With feet doest frame, false Phœcus and impure,
With sting has prickt for his lewd villany.[620]
Pliny says: “Certain it is, that if a menstruous woman do no more but touch a Bee-hive, all the Bees will be gone and never more come to it again.”[621]
In Western Pennsylvania, it is believed that Bees will invariably sting red-haired persons as soon as they approach the hives.
It is a common opinion that Bees in rough and boisterous weather, and particularly in a violent storm, carry a stone in their legs, in order to preserve themselves by its weight against the power of the wind. Its antiquity is also great, for in the writings of Plutarch we find an instance of this remarkable wisdom. “The Bees of Candi,” says this philosopher, “being about to double a point or cape lying into the sea, which is much exposed to the winds, they ballase (ballast) themselves with small grit or petty stones, for to be able to endure the weather, and not be carried away against their wills with the winds through their lightness otherwise.”[622]
Virgil, too, about a century earlier, mentions this curious notion in the following lines:
And as when empty barks on billows float,
With sandy ballast sailors trim the boat;
So Bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight.[623]