Nearly a century earlier, Vergil, the poet of rural life, as well as of loftier themes, wrote a charming book—his Fourth Georgic—on the subject of these our winged friends. We may smile at his wondrous plan for securing a prodigious swarm, and modern methods may claim far more reasonableness and success than those he advocates in apiculture; but we may rejoice to see how bewitching was the pursuit of bee-keeping nearly two millenniums ago, and how true it has been through all the centuries, as the French writer Gelieu says, "Beaucoup de gens aiment les abeilles; je n'ai vu personne qui les aima médiocrement: on se passionne pour elles."
The orator Cicero makes frequent reference to them in his charming treatise on Old Age, and other classical writers allude not unfrequently to these insects.
Columella, who lived in the first century of the Christian era, gave, in his work De re rusticâ, many directions for apiarians; and though, of course, abounding, like Vergil's work, in errors on certain points, his book shows a decided advance beyond the knowledge of preceding writers.
We might speak of Theophrastus, Celsus, and Varro as contributing to the literature of bee-lore, but it would be beyond the scope of our design to detail what they have written on the subject. Coming, however, down to much more recent times, and to our own country, we cannot resist the temptation to quote the well-known lines of our most marvellous poet Shakespeare, whose comprehensive intellect almost rivalled that of Solomon, for "he spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts and of fowl and of creeping things and of fishes." The passage to which we now especially refer is to be found in his play of Henry F., act i. sc. 2:—
"Therefore doth heaven divide
The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavour in continual motion;
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,
Obedience: for so work the honey-bees;
Creatures, that, by a rule in nature, teach