Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to éxecutors pale
The lazy yawning drone.”—Henry V., 1, 2.
Nothing escaped the wonderful vision of this “myriad-minded” man, and its pertinent application.
This description, although certainly not technically accurate, is a superb broad sketch, and shows how well he was acquainted with the natural history and habits of the domestic bee.
The curiosity bees have attracted from time immemorial, and the wonders of their economy elicited by the observation and study of modern investigators, is but a grateful return for the benefits derived to man from their persevering assiduity and skill. It is the just homage of reason to perfect instinct running closely parallel to its own wonderful attributes. Indeed, so complex are many of the operations of this instinct, as to have induced the surmise of a positive affinity to reason, instead of its being a mere analogy, working blindly and without reflection. The felicity of the adaptation of the hexagonal waxen cells, and the skill of the construction of the comb to their purposes, has occupied the abstruse calculations of profound mathematicians; and since human ingenuity has devised modes of investigating, unobserved, the various proceedings of the interior of the hive, wonder has grown still greater, and admiration has reached its climax.
The intimate connection of “Bees” with nature’s elegancies, the Flowers, is an association which links them agreeably to our regard, for each suggests the other; their vivacity and music giving animation and variety to what might otherwise pall by beautiful but inanimate attractions. When we combine with this the services bees perform in their eager pursuits, our admiration extends beyond them to their Great Originator, who, by such apparently small means, accomplishes so simply yet completely, a most important object of creation.
That bees were cultivated by man in the earliest conditions of his existence, possibly whilst his yet limited family was still occupying the primitive cradle of the race at Hindoo Koosh, or on the fertile slopes of the Himalayas, or upon the more distant table-land or plateau of Thibet, or in the delicious vales of Cashmere, or wherever it might have been, somewhere widely away to the east of the Caspian Sea,—is a very probable supposition. Accident, furthered by curiosity, would have early led to the discovery of the stores of honey which the assiduity of bees had hoarded;—its agreeable savour would have induced further search, which would have strengthened the possession by keener observation, and have led in due course to the fixing them in his immediate vicinity.
To this remote period, possibly not so early as the discovery of the treasures of the bee, may be assigned also the first domestication of the animals useful to man, many of which are still found in those districts in all their primitive wildness. The discovery and cultivation of the cereal plants will also date from this early age. The domestication of animals has never been satisfactorily explained, but all inquiry seems to point to those regions as the native land, both of them, and of the gramineæ, which produce our grain; for Heinzelmann, Linnæus’s enthusiastic disciple, found there those grasses still growing wild, which have not been found elsewhere in a natural state.