Concerning the piety of Bees, we find the following legends:
“A certaine simple woman having some stals of Bees which
yeelded not vnto her hir desired profit, but did consume and die of the murraine; made her mone to another woman more simple than hir selfe: who gave her councel to get a consecrated host or round Godamighty and put it among them. According to whose advice she went to the priest to receive the host; which when she had done, she kept it in hir month, and being come home againe she tooke it out and put it into one of hir hives. Wherevpon the murraine ceased, and the honey abounded. The woman therefore lifting vp the hive at the due time to take out the honie, sawe there (most strange to be seene) a chapel built by the Bees with an altar in it, the wals adorned by marvelous skil of architecture with windowes conveniently set in their places: also a dore and a steeple with bels. And the host being laid vpon the altar, the Bees making a sweet noise flew round about it.”[602]
Mr. Hawker’s legend is to this effect: A Cornish woman, one summer, finding her Bees refused to leave their “cloistered home” and had “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.