The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

Herein, no doubt, is to be found a clue to the whole mystery. If it was not the honey-bee—the Apis mellifica of modern naturalists—which was generated from the entombed body of Virgil’s unfortunate bull-calf, what other insect, closely resembling a bee, could have been produced under those conditions? The answer has been readily given by several naturalists of our own time. There is a fly, called the drone-fly, which exactly meets the difficulty. He is so like the ordinary honey-bee that on one occasion, and that recently, he was mistaken for the genuine insect by one calling himself a bee-expert, and holding a diploma officially entitling him to the use of that name. This drone-fly would have behaved almost exactly as Virgil’s calf-bred bees are said to have behaved, and according to the various descriptions of the matter given by other writers living before and since. He would issue forth in a dense cloud immediately his natal prison-doors were opened, and he would comport himself in other ways exactly as enumerated. Finally, he would beget himself joyously to the open country, as a swarm of bees would do; and once more the Virgilian theory of bee-production would meet with its seeming verification.

But having gone thus far with the drone-fly, it is difficult to resist going a little farther. We cannot leave him in the ignominious company of slaughtered oxen, but must give him his due of more lordly associations. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” When Samson went down to Timnath on his fateful mission of wooing, and saw the carcass by the way beset with a cloud of insects, we need not cast any doubt on his genuine belief that they were honey-bees. He propounded his riddle in all good faith, and the form of it can very well be explained as a not undue stretch of allowable poetic privilege. But that the creatures he saw hovering about the dead lion were really bees, and that Samson actually obtained honey from the carcass, is not to be accepted without the exercise of a faith that is undistinguishable from credulity. Many attempts have been made to explain away the difficulties of the problem on natural lines, but they are all alike unconvincing. There is little doubt at this time that the part of the story dealing with the honey is nothing but a deft embroidering on the original legend by some later chronicler; and that the insects which were seen about the dead lion were really drone-flies generated in the same fashion as those from Virgil’s ox.

Perhaps no better general idea is to be obtained of the condition of bee-knowledge among the ancients than from the writings of Pliny, the Elder, who was born in A.D. 23. He, too, deals with the ox-born bees; but the reader’s interest will centre for the most part in Pliny’s grave and careful account of the life and customs of the honey-bee, as commonly accepted among his contemporaries. Very few indeed of the facts he so picturesquely details have any real foundation in truth. Like nearly all the classic writers, he had little more accurate knowledge of the life within the hive than we have of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean But he made up for this deficiency, as did all others of his time, by dipping largely into the stores of his own fancy as well as those of other people.

His account of the origin and nature of honey is quaintly pleasant reading. “Honey,” he says, “is engendered from the air, mostly at the rising of the constellations, and more especially when Sirius is shining; never, however, before the rising of the Vergiliæ, and then just before daybreak. . . . Whether it is that this liquid is the sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from the stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself—would that it had been, when it comes to us, pure, limpid, and genuine, as it was when first it took its downward descent. But, as it is, falling from so vast a height, attracting corruption in its passage, and tainted by the exhalations of the earth as it meets them; sucked, too, as it is, from off the trees and the herbage of the fields, and accumulated in the stomachs of the bees, for they cast it up again through the mouth; deteriorated besides by the juices of flowers, and then steeped within the hives and subjected to such repeated changes:—still, in spite of all this, it affords us by its flavour a most exquisite pleasure, the result, no doubt, of its æthereal nature and origin.”

Modern bee-keepers ascribe the varying quality in honey nowadays to the prevalence of good or bad nectar-producing crops during the time of its gathering, or to its admixture with that bane of the apiculturist—the detestable honey-dew. But Pliny set this down entirely to the influence of the stars. When certain constellations were in the ascendant, bad honey resulted, because their exudations were inferior. Honey collected after the rising of Sirius—the famous honey-star of all the ancient writers—was invariably of good quality. But when Sirius ruled the skies in conjunction with the rising of Venus, Jupiter, or Mercury, honey was not honey at all, but a sort of heavenly nostrum or medicament, which not only had the power to cure diseases of the eyes and bowels, and ameliorate ulcers, but actually could restore the dead to life. Similar virtues were possessed by honey gathered after the appearance of a rainbow, provided—as Pliny is careful to warn us—that no rain intervenes between the rainbow and the time of the bees’ foraging.

On the life-history of the honey-bee Pliny wrote voluminously. He tells us of a nation of industrious creatures ruled over by a king, distinguished by a white spot on his forehead like a diadem. These king-bees were of three sorts—red, black, and mottled; but the red were superior to all the rest. He appears to accept, though guardedly, the old legend that sexual intercourse among bees was divinely abrogated in favour of a system of procreation originating in the flowers. He mentions a current belief—which must have been the boldest of heresies at the time—that the king-bee is the only male, all the rest being females. The existence of the drones he explains away very ingeniously. “They would seem,” he says, “to be a kind of imperfect bee, formed the very last of all; the expiring effort, as it were, of worn-out and exhausted old age, a late and tardy offspring.”

The discipline in the hives was, according to Pliny, a very rigid affair. Early in the morning the whole population was awakened by one bee sounding a clarion. The day’s work was carried through on strict military lines, and at evening the king’s bugler was again to be observed flying about the hive, uttering the same shrill fanfaronade by which the colony was roused at daybreak. After this note was heard, all work ceased for the day, and the hive became immediately silent.

His book abounds in curious details as to hive-life. When foraging bees are overtaken in their expeditions by nightfall, they place themselves on their backs on the ground, to protect their wings from the dew, thus lying and watching until the first sign of dawn, when they return to the colony. At swarming-time, the king-bee does not fly, but is carried out by his attendants. Pliny warns intending bee-keepers not to place their hives within sound of an echo, this being very injurious to the bees; but, he adds, the clapping of hands and tinkling of brass afford bees especial delight. He ascribes to them an astonishing longevity, some living as long as seven years. But the hives must be placed out of the reach of frogs, who, it seems, were fond of breathing into hives, this causing great mortality among its occupants. When bees need artificial food, they are to be supplied with raisins or dried figs beaten to a pulp, carded wool steeped in wine, hydromel, or the raw flesh of poultry. Wax, Pliny says, is best clarified by first boiling it in sea-water, and then drying it in the light of the moon, for whiteness. And in taking honey from the hives, a person must be well washed and clean. Malefactors are cautioned against approaching a hive of bees at any time. Bees, he assures us, have a particular aversion to a thief.

To the latter-day practical bee-keeper, all these minute details given by the classic writers read very like useless and cumbersome nonsense; and it seems matter for wonder that the bees contrived to exist at all under such ingeniously complicated mismanagement, born, as it was, of an ignorance flawed by scarcely a single ascertained fact. But the truth stands out pretty clearly that bee-keeping two thousand years ago was really a very large and important industry. One apiary is mentioned by Varro as yielding five thousand pounds of honey yearly, while the annual produce of another brought in a sum of ten thousand sesterces. Pliny mentions the islands of Crete and Cyprus, and the coast-country of Africa, as producing honey in great abundance. Sicily was famous for the good quality of its beeswax, but Corsica seems to have been one of the main sources of this. When the island was subject to the Romans, it is said that a tribute of two hundred thousand pounds’ weight of wax was yearly exacted from it. This, however, is such an astounding figure that it must be taken with a certain caution.

Evidently the bees in the ancient world managed their business in fairly good fashion, in spite of the ignorance of their masters, or at least of the ancient chroniclers de re rustica. But it should always be borne in mind that the writers on husbandry and kindred subjects were seldom practical men. With the single exception, perhaps, of Virgil’s “Georgicon,” these old books relating to apiculture bear unmistakable evidence of being, for the most part, merely compilations from writings still more ancient, or heterogeneous gatherings together of hearsays and current fables of the time. It is certain that the men who were actually engaged in the craft of bee-keeping, and who knew most about it, wrote nothing at all. Probably they concerned themselves very little with the myths and fables of bee-craft, and owed their success to hard, practical, everyday experience, which is the surest, and perhaps the only, guide to-day.