“Some are content with saying that they do it by Instinct, and let it drop there; but I believe God has given us something farther to do, than to invent names for things, and then let them drop.”—A. I. Root.
CHAPTER I
THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE
“While great Cæsar hurled War’s lightnings by high Euphrates, . . . even in that season I, Virgil, nurtured in sweet Parthenope, went in the ways of lowly Quiet.”—Fourth Book of the Georgics.
It was in Naples—the Parthenope of the Ancients—that the “best poem by the best poet” was written, nearly two thousand years ago. Essentially an apostle of the Simple Life, the cultured and courtly Virgil chose to live a quiet rural existence among his lemon-groves and his bee-hives, when he might have dwelt in the very focus of honour at the Roman capital; where his friend and patron, Mæcenas, the prime minister of Octavian, kept open house for all the great in literature and art.
Modern bee-keepers, athirst for the Americanisation of everything, give little heed nowadays to the writings of one whom Bacon has called “the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known.” And yet, if the question were asked, What book should first be placed in the hands of the beginner in apiculture to-day? no wiser choice than this fourth book of the Georgics could be made.
For Virgil goes direct to the great heart of the matter, which is the same to-day as it was two thousand years ago. The bee-keeper must be first of all a bee-lover, or he will never succeed; and Virgil’s love for his bees shines through his book from beginning to end. Of course, in a writer so deeply under the spell of Grecian influences, it is to be expected that such a work would faithfully reproduce most of the errors immortalised by Aristotle some three hundred years before. But these only serve to bring the real value of the book into stronger relief. Through the rich incrustation of poetic fancy, and the fragrant mythological garniture, we cannot fail to see the true bee-lover writing directly out of his own knowledge, gathered at first hand among his own bees.
Virgil knew, and lovingly recorded, all that eyes and ears could tell him about bee-life; and it is only within the last two hundred years or so that any new fact has been added to Virgil’s store. All the writers on apiculture, from the earliest times down to the eighteenth century, have done little else than pass from hand to hand the fantastic errors of the ancient “bee-fathers,” adding generally still more fantastic speculations of their own. And until Schirach got together his little band of patient investigators of hive-life about a hundred years ago, Virgil’s fourth Georgic—considered as a practical guide to bee-keeping—was still very nearly as well-informed and up-to-date as any.
It is not, however, for its technical worth that the book is to be recommended to the apiarian tiro of to-day. All that has become hopelessly old-fashioned with the passing of the ancient strawskep in the last generation. The intrinsic value of Virgil’s writings lies in their atmosphere of poetry and romance, which ought to be held inseparable, now as ever, from a craft which is probably the most ancient in the world. Almost alone among country occupations to-day, bee-keeping can retain much of its entrancing old-world flavour, and yet live and thrive. But if the modern tendency to make the usual unlovely transatlantic thing of British honey-farming is to be checked, nothing will do more to that end than an early instillation of Virgil’s beautiful philosophy.
Dipping into this fascinating poem—with its delightful blend of carefully told fact, and rich fancy, and quaint garnerings from records then extant, but now lost in the ages—we can reconstruct for ourselves a picture of Virgil’s country retreat near “sweet Parthenope,” where he loitered, and mused, and wrought the faultless hexameters of the Georgics with so much care and labour, that the work took seven years to accomplish—which is at the rate of less than a line a day.
Virgil’s house stood, probably, on the wooded slope above the town of Naples, deep set in orange-groves and lemon-plantations, and in full view, to the north, of the snow-pinnacled Apennines, and, southward, of the blue waters of the Bay. Vesuvius, too, with its eternal menace of grey smoke, rose dark against the morning sun only a few leagues onward; and, at its foot, the doomed cities nestled, Pompeii and Herculaneum, then with still a hundred years of busy life to run.