The Vicar of Morwenstow, among the beautiful poems to be found in his
_Echoes from Old Cornwall_, has one entitled "A Legend of the Hive:" it
commences--
"Behold those winged images!
Bound for their evening bowers;
They are the nation of the bees,
Born from the breath of flowers:
Strange people are they; a mystic race
In life, and food, and dwelling-place!"
As another poet has sung:
"His quidam signis, atque hæc exempla secuti,
_Esse Apibus partem Divinæ mentis_ et haustus
Ætherios dixere."
Mr. Hawker's Legend is to this effect: A Cornish woman, one summer, finding
her bees refused to leave their "cloistered home," and "ceased to play
around the cottage flowers," concealed a portion of the Holy Eucharist
which she obtained at church:
"She bore it to her distant home,
She laid it by the hive
To lure the wanderers forth to roam,
That so her store might thrive;--
'Twas a wild wish, a thought unblest,
Some evil legend of the West.
"But lo! at morning-tide a sign,
For wondering eyes to trace,
They found above that Bread, a shrine
Rear'd by the harmless race!
They brought their walls from bud and flower,
They built bright roof and beamy tower!
"Was it a dream? or did they hear
Float from those golden cells
A sound, as of some psaltery near,
Or soft and silvery bells?
A low sweet psalm, that griev'd within
In mournful memory of the sin!"
The following passage from Howell's _Parley of Beasts_, Lond. 1660,
furnishes a similar legend of the piety of bees. Bee speaks:
"Know, Sir, that we have also a religion as well as so exact a
government among us here; our hummings you speak of are as so many
hymns to the Great God of Nature; and ther is a miraculous example in
_Cæsaries Cisterniensis_, how som of the Holy Eucharist being let fall
in a medow by a priest, as he was returning from visiting a sick body,
a swarm of bees being hard by took It up, and in a solemn kind of
procession carried It to their hive, and there erected an altar of the
purest wax for It, where It was found in that form, and untouched."--P.
144.
It is remarkable that, in the Septuagint version of Prov. vi. 8., the bee
is introduced after the ant, and reference is made to [Greek: tên ergasian
hôs semnên poieitai: ergas. sem.] St. Ambrose translates it _operationem
venerabilem_; St. Jerome, _opus castum_; Castalio, _augustum opus_; Bochart
prefers _opus pretiosum, aut mirabile_.[1]
Pliny has much to say about bees. I shall give an extract or two in the Old
English of Philemon Holland:
"Bees naturally are many times sick; and that do they shew most
evidently: a man shall see it in them by their heavie looks and by
their unlustines to their businesse: ye shall marke how some will bring
forth others that be sicke and diseased into the warme sunne, and be
readie to minister unto them and give them meat. Nay, ye shall have
them to carie forth their dead, and to accompanie the corps full
decently, as in a solemne funerall. If it chaunce that the king be dead
of some pestilent maladie, the commons and subjects mourne, take
thought, and grieve with heavie cheere and sad countenance: idle they
be, and take no joy to do any thing: they gather in no provision: they
march not forth: onely with a certain doleful humming they gather round
about his corps, and will not away.
"Then requisite it is and necessarie to sever and part the multitude,
and so to take away the bodie from them: otherwise they would keepe a
looking at the breathlesse carcasse, and never go from it, but still
mone and mourne without end. And even then also they had need be
cherished and comforted with good victuals, otherwise they would pine
away and die with hunger."--Lib. XI. cap. xviii.
"We bury our dead with great solemnity; at the king's death there is a
generall mourning and fasting, with a cessation from labour, and we use
to go about his body with a sad murmur for many daies. When we are sick
we have attendants appointed us, and the symptoms when we be sick are
infallible, according to the honest, plain poet:
"If bees be sick (for all that live must die),
That may be known by signes most certainly;
Their bodies are discoloured, and their face
Looks wan, which shows that death comes on apace.
They carry forth their dead, and do lament,
Hanging o' th' dore, or in their hives are pent.'"
_Howell_, p. 138.
Of bees especially the proverb holds good, that "Truth is stranger than
fiction." The discoveries of Huber, Swammerdam, Reaumur, Latreille, Bonnet,
and other moderns, read more like a fairy-tale than anything else, and yet
the subject is far from being exhausted. At the same time modern
naturalists have substantiated the accuracy of the ancients in many
statements which were considered ridiculous fables. The ancients {168}
anticipated us so far as even to have used _glass hives_, for the purpose
of observing the wonderful proceedings of this winged nation. Bochart,
quoting an old writer, says:
"Fecit illis Aristoteles _Alveare Vitreum_, ut introspiceret, qua
ratione ad opus se accingerent. Sed abnuerunt quidquam operari, donec
interiora vitri luto oblevisset."--_Hierozoicon_, Lond. 1663, folio,
Part II. p. 514.