But concerning this practice, Langstroth says: “It is probably not a whit more efficacious than the hideous noises of some savage tribes, who, imagining that the sun, in an eclipse, has been swallowed by an enormous dragon, resort to such means to compel his snakeship to disgorge their favorite luminary.”[652]

Dr. Toner, the author of that very interesting little work, “Maternal Instinct or Love,” informs me that when a boy he witnessed a mode of alluring a swarm of Bees to settle, performed by a German man and his wife, which struck him at the time as being remarkable, and which was as follows: Having first put some pig-manure upon the hive into which

they wished the Bees to go, they ran to and fro under the swarm, singing a monotonous German hymn; and this they continued till the Bees were settled and hived.

Another strange mode of alluring Bees into a new hive is practiced near Gloucester, England, but only when all the usual ways of preparing hives fail; it is this: When a swarm is to be hived, instead of moistening the inside of the hive with honey, or sugar and water, the Bee-master throws into it, inverted, about a pint of beans, which he causes a sow to devour, and immediately then, it is said, will the Bees take to it.[653]

Pliny, as follows, incidentally mentions another curious mode of preparing the hives to best suit the Bees: “Touching Baulme, which the Greeks call Melittis or Melissophyllon: if Bee-hives be rubbed all over and besmeared with the juice thereof, the Bees will never go away; for there is not a flower whereof they be more desirous and faine than of it.”[654]

Borlase, in his Antiquities of Cornwall, p. 168, tells us of another strange practice in the hiving of Bees. He says: “The Cornish, to this day, invoke the spirit of Browny, when their Bees swarm; and they think that their crying Browny, Browny, will prevent them from returning into the former hive, and make them pitch and form a new colony.”[655]

The Rev. Thomas P. Hunt, of Wyoming, Pa., has devised an amusing plan, by which he says he can, at all times, prevent a swarm of Bees from leaving his premises. Before his stocks swarm, he collects a number of dead Bees, and, stringing them with a needle and thread, as worms are strung for catching eels, makes of them a ball about the size of an egg, leaving a few strands loose. By carrying—fastened to a pole—this “Bee-bob” about his Apiary, when the Bees are swarming, or by placing it in some central position, he invariably secures every swarm.[656]

The barbarous practice of killing Bees for their honey, not yet entirely abolished, did not exist in the time of Aristotle, Varro, Columella, and Pliny. The old cultivators

took only what their Bees could spare, killing no stocks except such as were feeble or diseased. The following epitaph, taken from a German work, might well be placed over every pit of these brimstoned insects:

Here Rests,
CUT OFF FROM USEFUL LABOR,
A COLONY OF
INDUSTRIOUS BEES,
BASELY MURDERED
BY ITS
UNGRATEFUL AND IGNORANT
OWNER.