bring no surplus; sometimes it is necessary to supplement the winter store; but no real lover of bees, even though a stern critic of their rule of life, would surrender his hives merely because they yielded nothing save labour and a few stings.

When we turn to the writers of old time we find they are at their best when they do not commit themselves. Homer has a well-remembered simile in the 'Iliad' (Bk. II):

'Even as when the tribes of thronging bees issue from some hollow rock, ever in fresh procession, and fly clustering among the flowers of spring, and some on this hand and some on that fly thick; even so, from the ships and huts before the low beach, marched forth their many tribes by companies to the place of assembly.'*

Euripides has a haunting line in the 'Hippolytus':

'the bee

Roveth the springtide mead undesecrate.'†

Æsop's eighty-fifth fable is concerned with bees. Theocritus brings the bee-note into his sylvan orchestra as delicately as a modern composer would allot a few bars to the piccolo or the cor-anglais, and the result is perfect. So, too, does Moschus. Turn to Aristophanes and we find him going astray. In 'The Knights' there is a chorus:

'Active, eager, airy thing,
Ever hovering on the wing,
Ever hovering and discovering
Golden sweet secreted honey,

Nature's vintage and her money.' ‡

Here we find the long-lived belief that bees extracted honey from flowers; the work that must be done to transform the nectar being quite unimagined. There more subtle note in a semi-chorus from 'The

is a Birds':

'Chant with me

The music of Phrynichus open and plain,

The first that attempted a loftier strain,

Ever busy like the bee, with the sweets of harmony.' I

* Translation of Lang, Leaf, and Myers.

+ Translation of A. S. Way.

Translation of J. Hookham Frere.

Antiphilus of Byzantium, writing in the first century A.D., attains a greater accuracy while losing no charm:

'But one small hive-cot only
Which bee doth make to teem,
Though tiny be her body,

With ample honey stream.
God bless you, lissom creatures!
Go, in the flowery mead.

Ye winged busy workers

On heavenly nectar feed.'*

Gregory of Nazianzus (fourth century A.D.) is one of the earliest to enforce a lesson from the bee's labours, though it is not easy for the dispassionate observer who sees the hive in the light of the investigations that barframes have made, possible, to say 'amen' to his concluding prayer:

'Now doth the busy bee full blive
Unlock her wing and quit the hive,
Through pastures green and sunny
Displaying marvellous-worthy wit;
While hither, thither, doth she flit,
Despoiling flower of honey.

"This-worketh virgin waxen comb,
Six sided pipes to form her home,
The which, inspired by duty
She weaves and dovetails, all in fine
Neat handiwork, that doth combine
Security with beauty;

"That-takes the pollen and the mel
And stores them safely in the cell
And caps the honey over;

But, though her master claim the spoil
Whereon himself did spend no toil
Yet, 'mid the field of clover,

'In season she doth never cease
To labour hard and make increase
Of nectar-syrup ample;

* Translation of the Rev. G. R. Woodward.

And O! that men in Jesus' hive
Might at such industry arrive
And follow bees' example.'*

Here writes the bee-lover, the man with marked powers of observation. Note the reference to the locking of the wings, the work of comb-making which demands a high temperature won by clustering, the reference to the strength as well as the beauty of the hexagonal cell, the storage of pollen, the toil in the clover fields.

The Rev. George R. Woodward, to whom I am indebted for these translations, has made many others. He is a bee-keeper, and consequently an enthusiast.

Here is an attractive rendering from the Greek of an unknown poet: t

Greek

'When bees come hither in the fair springtide
Tell them, ye nymphs, and cattle-pastures chill
How on a wintry night Leucippus died
While snaring scampering hares upon the hill;
The hives no more shall feel his fostering skill
But the sad hollows, where the flocks are fed,
For very grief are sighing for him still;

The neighbour of the mountain peak is dead.'

Another unknown poet of the Anthology has the

line:

"'Twas to thy lips, Menander, the bees their honey bare.'

Some of the world's great thinkers have turned to the hive for their aphorisms. We read in the Talmud that a word is like a bee for it hath both honey and sting. Marcus Aurelius is impressed by the fact that the worker bee claims no credit for the task undertaken, the end achieved. 'As a horse after a race, and a hunting dog when he hath hunted, and a bee when she hath made her honey, look not for applause and condemnation.' And again, in similar strain, he writes, 'As a bee when it has made honey, so a man when he has done a good act does not call for others to come and see, but goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in due season.' This passage has a curious echo of the East

* Translation of the Rev. G. R. Woodward.

+ Translation of J. A. Pott.

'where God was born.' It is a teaching with which the disciples of Brahma were perfectly familiar, and may be found again and again in the Mahabharata. Man must act impersonally, detaching himself from his acts and, thereby, saving himself from the bondage of deeds.' 'That which is not good for the swarming, neither is it good for the bee,' is another of the Aurelian aphorisms, one to which the modern bee-master would take exception, holding that swarming is not good for the honey harvest. He seeks to prevent it by cutting out queen cells, enlarging brood and store space, and by other means that do not call for description here, his object being to maintain the largest possible head of bees in any given hive during the honey flow for the sake of the stores, and during the winter for the sake of the heat. A stock that throws a swarm and follows it with casts headed by virgin queens is the bee-master's despair.

There is a legend told among Mohammedans that the worker bee, proud of her sting, prayed that its wound might be mortal. And Allah answered the bee, "Since thou art so ill-disposed, it is thyself shall die after stinging." This does not always happen. If a bee can turn its sting round and round withdrawal is sometimes possible, but as a rule the bee that stings is disembowelled and dies. Happily the bee is not always put to shame by The Friend of God.' In the sixteenth Sura of Al Koran we read:

'The Lord spake by inspiration unto the Bee saying, "Provide thee houses in the mountains and in the trees and of those materials wherewith men build hives for thee; then eat of every kind of fruit, and walk in the beaten paths of thy Lord. There issueth from their bellies a liquor of various colour; wherein is a medicine for men. Verily, herein is a sign unto people who consider. God hath created you and he will hereafter cause you to die; and some of you shall have life prolonged to a decrepit old age, so that he shall forget whatever he knew, for God is wise and powerful.' *

The non-sequitur here may be Mohammed's; but is more likely to be Sale's, for Arabists tell us that the beauties of the Koran still lie buried in the original, and that no Englishman has yet caught the spirit of the

Sale's Translation.

work that sustains to this day so many millions of 'True Believers.' As the passage runs, it is hard to trace the relation between the directions given to the bee and the reminder of man's mortality.

To deal at length with the references in any class of literature would be impossible, the limits both of reading and space forbid. There is a rich harvest to be had for the gathering; but it is time to turn now to English writers, for there are few men of distinction in literature who have found it possible to omit all reference to the bee. From the Father of English Poetry among the immortals to Mr W. B. Yeats and Mr Tickner Edwardes among living writers the stream of reference may be traced. Chaucer in the Cook's Tale writes:

'He was as ful of love and paramour
As is the hyve ful of hony sweete.'

And in his Tale of Melibeus :

'Thy name is Melibee, this is to seyn "a man that drynketh hony." Thou hast ydronke so muchel hony of sweete temporeel richnesses and delices and honours of this world, that thou art dronken and hast forgotten Jhesu Christ thy Creatour. . . . Ne thou ne hast not well ytaken kepe to the words of Ovide, that seith, "Under the hony of the goodes of the body is hid the venym that sleeth the soule" and Salamon seith "If thou hast founden honey, ete of it that suffiseth, for if thou ete of it out of mesure, thou shalt speue and be nedy and poore.'"

Whatever we may think of the bee, though our modern investigations suggest that principles moral and immoral alike are absent from the hive, the bee has always been held up to mankind as a model of virtue and industry. Chaucer had evidently watched the outpouring of the swarm; it is a sight that may well inspire a poet. In the Nun Priest's Tale we read that

'The gees, for feere flowen over the trees,
Out of the hyve cam the swarm of bees';

and in the Squire's Tale,

'As manye heddes as manye wittes ther been
They murmureden as dooth a swarm of bees.'

The Elizabethans did not fail to summon the hive to the service of their music. Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe