FOLK LORE.
Death Omen by Bees.
—It is not wonderful that the remarkable instincts and intelligence of the honey-bee, its domesticity, and the strong affinity of its social habits to human institutions, should make it the object of many superstitious observances, and I think it probable that if enquiry be made of that class of people amongst whom such branches of folk-lore are most frequently found lingering, other prejudices respecting bees than those lately noticed by some of your correspondents might be discovered.
If the practice of making the bees acquainted with the mortuary events of the family ever prevailed in that part of Sussex from whence I write, I think it must be worn out, for I have not heard of it. But there is another superstition, also appertaining to mortality, which is very generally received, and which is probably only one of a series of such, and amongst which it is probable the practice before-mentioned might once be reckoned. Some years since the wife of a respectable cottager in my neighbourhood died in childbed. Calling on the widower soon after, I found that although deeply deploring a loss which left him several motherless children, he spoke calmly of the fatal termination of the poor woman's illness, as an inevitable and foregone conclusion. On being pressed for an explanation of these sentiments, I discovered that both him and his poor wife had been "warned" of the coming event by her going into the garden a fortnight before her confinement, and discovering that their bees, in the act of swarming, had made choice of a dead hedge stake for their settling-place. This is generally considered as an infallible sign of a death in the family, and in her situation it is no wonder that the poor woman should take the warning to herself; affording, too, another example of how a prediction may assist in working out its own fulfilment.
Seeing that another P-urveyor to your useful P-ages has assumed the same signature as myself, for the future permit me, for contradistinction, to be—
"J. P. P.," but not "CLERK OF THIS PARISH."