CHAPTER XI.
BEES.
THE BEAUTIFUL NEVER TO BE THANKED TOO MUCH, OR TO BE SUFFICIENTLY EXPRESSED.—BEES AND THEIR ELEGANCE.—THEIR ADVICE TO AN ITALIAN POET.—WAXEN TAPERS.—A BEE DRAMA.—MASSACRES OF DRONES.—HUMAN PROGRESSION.
It would be ungrateful and impossible, in the course of so sweet and generous a theme as our Jar of Honey has furnished us with, not to devote a portion of it to the cause of all its sweetness—the Bee. We are not going, however, to repeat more common-place in its eulogy than we can help. The grounds of the admiration of nature are without end; and as to those matters of fact or science which appear to be settled—nay, even most settled—some new theory is coming up every day, in these extraordinary times, to compel us to think the points over again, and doubt whether we are quite so knowing as we supposed. Not only are bee-masters disputing the discoveries of Huber respecting the operations of the hive, but searchers into nature seem almost prepared to re-open the old question respecting the equivocal generation of the bee, and set the electrical experiments of Mr. Cross at issue with the conclusions of Redi.
How this may turn out, we know not; but sure we are, that it will be a long time indeed before the praise and glory of the bee can have exhausted its vocabulary—before people cry out to authors, “Say no more; you have said too much already of its wonderfulness—too much of the sweetness and beauty of its productions.” Too much, we are of opinion, cannot be said of any marvel in nature, unless it be trivial or false. The old prosaical charge against hyperbolical praises of the beautiful, we hold to be naught. Ask a lover, and he will say, and say truly, that no human terms can do justice to the sweetness in his mistress’s eyes—to the virgin bloom on her cheek. If words could equal them, Nature would hardly be our superior. Hear what is said on the point by Marlowe:—
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feelings of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they ’stil
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit:
If these had made one poem’s period,
And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
Did any one ever sufficiently admire the entire elegance of the habits and pursuits of bees? their extraction of nothing but the quintessence of the flowers; their preference of those that have the finest and least adulterated odour; their avoidance of everything squalid (so unlike flies); their eager ejection or exclusion of it from the hive, as in the instance of carcases of intruders, which, if they cannot drag away, they cover up and entomb; their love of clean, quiet, and delicate neighbourhoods, thymy places with brooks; their singularly clean management of so liquid and adhesive a thing as honey, from which they issue forth to their work as if they had had nothing to do with it; their combination with honey-making of the elegant manufacture of wax, of which they make their apartments, and which is used by mankind for none but patrician or other choice purposes; their orderly policy; their delight in sunshine; their attention to one another; their apparent indifference to everything purely regarding themselves, apart from the common good? A writer of elegant Italian verse, who recast the book of Virgil on Bees, has taken occasion of their supposed dislike of places abounding in echoes, to begin his poem with a pretty conceit. He was one of the first of his countrymen who ventured to dispense with rhyme; and he makes the bees themselves send him a deputation, on purpose to admonish him not to use it:—