We quote also another from the School of the Eucharist:
“A certain peasant of Auvergne, a province in France, perceiving that his Bees were likely to die, to prevent this misfortune, was advised, after he had received the communion, to reserve the Host, and to blow it into one of the hives. As he tried to do it, the Host fell on the ground. Behold now a wonder! On a sudden all the Bees came forth out of their hives, and ranging themselves in good order, lifted the Host from the ground, and carrying it in upon their wings, placed it among the combes. After this the man went out about his business, and at his return found that this advice had succeeded ill, for all his Bees were dead.…”[607]
We will close this series of legends with one from the Lives of the Saints:
“When a thief by night had stolen St. Medard’s Bees, they, in their master’s quarrel, leaving their hive, set upon the malefactor, and eagerly pursuing him which way soever he ran, would not cease stinging of him until they had made him (whether he would or no) to go back again to their master’s house; and there, falling prostrate at his feet, submissly to cry him mercy for the crime committed. Which being done, so soon as the Saint extended unto him the hand of benediction, the Bees, like obedient servants, did forthwith stay from persecuting him, and evidently yielded
themselves to the ancient possession and custody of their master.”[608]
By the Greeks, Bees were accounted an omen of future eloquence;[609] the soothsayers of the Romans, however, deemed them always of evil augury.[610] They afforded also to the Romans presages of public interest, “clustering, as they do, like a bunch of grapes, upon houses or temples; presages, in fact, that are often accounted for by great events.”[611] The instances of happy omens afforded by swarms of Bees are the following:
“It is said of Pindar,” we read in Pausanias’ History of Greece, “that when he was a young man, as he was going to Thespia, being wearied with the heat, as it was noon, and in the height of summer, he fell asleep at a small distance from the public road; and that Bees, as he was asleep, flew to him and wrought their honey on his lips. This circumstance first induced Pindar to compose verses.”[612]
A similar incident is mentioned in the life of Plato:
“Whilst Plato was yet an infant carried in the arms of his mother Perictione, Aristo his father went to Hymettus (a mountain in Attica eminent for abundance of Bees and Honey) to sacrifice to the Muses or Nymphs, taking his Wife and Child along with him; as they were busied in the Divine Rites, she laid the Child in a Thicket of Myrtles hard by; to whom, as he slept (in cunis dormienti) came a Swarm of Bees, Artists of Hymettian Honey, flying and buzzing about him, and (as it is reported) made a Honeycomb in his mouth. This was taken for a presage of the singular sweetness of his discourse; his future Eloquence foreseen in his infancy.”[613]
From Butler’s Lives of the Saints we have the following: