The Lore of the Honey-Bee

CHAPTER I. The Ancients and the Honey-Bee

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.

Bee-hives in Virgil’s day—as we can gather from certain ancient Roman bas-reliefs still in existence—were of a high, peaked, dome pattern, and they were made of stitched bark, or wattled osiers, as he himself tells us. Many of the directions he gives as to their situation and surroundings are still golden rules for every bee-keeper. The bee-garden, he says, must be sheltered from winds, and placed where neither sheep nor butting kids may trample down the flowers. Trees must be near for their cool shade, and to serve as resting-places when “the new-crowned kings lead out their earliest swarms in the sweet spring-time.” He tells us to place our hives near to water, or where a light rivulet speeds through the grass; and we are to cast into the water “large pebbles and willow-branches laid cross-wise, that the bees, when drinking, may have bridges to stand on, and spread their wings to the summer sun.”

Virgil’s method of hiving a swarm is almost identical with that followed by old-fashioned beemen to this day. The hive is to be scoured with crushed balm and honeywort, and then you are to “make a tinkling round about, and clash the cymbals of the Mother”—that is, of the goddess Cybele. The bees will forthwith descend, he tells us, and occupy the prepared nest. When the honey-harvest is taken, you are first to sprinkle your garments and cleanse your breath with pure water, and then to approach the hives “holding forth pursuing smoke in your hand.” And the old-time bee-man of to-day takes his mug of small-beer as a necessary rite, and washes himself before handling his hives.

But perhaps the great charm of the fourth Georgic consists, not in its nearness to truth about bee-life, but in the continual reference to the beautiful myths, and hardly less attractive errors, of immemorial times, copied so faithfully by mediæval writers, but not apt to be heard of by the learner of to-day unless he reads the old books.

Virgil begins his poem by speaking of “heaven-born honey, the gift of air,” in allusion to the belief that the nectar in flowers was not a secretion of the plant itself, but fell like manna from the skies. He seriously warns his readers of the disastrous effect of echoes on the denizens of a hive, and of the hurtful nature of burnt crab-shells; and tells us that in windy weather bees will carry about little pebbles as counterpoises, “as ships take in sand-ballast when they roll deep in the tossing surge.”

He was a firm believer in the Divine origin of bees. To all the ancients the honey-bee was a perpetual miracle, as much a sign and token of an omnipotent Will, set in the flowery meadows, as is the rainbow, to modern pietists, set in the sky. While all other creatures in the universe were seen to produce their kind by coition of the sexes, these mysterious winged people seemed to be exempt from the common law. Virgil, copying from much older writers, says, “they neither rejoice in bodily union, nor waste themselves in love’s languors, nor bring forth their young by pain of birth; but alone from the leaves and sweet-scented herbage they gather their children in their mouths, thus sustaining their strength of tiny citizens.”

Just as marvellous, however—at least to the modern entomologist—will appear the belief, widespread among the ancients, and shared by Virgil, that swarms of bees can be spontaneously generated from the decaying carcass of an ox. Virgil professes to derive his account of the matter from an old Egyptian legend, and he gives careful directions to bee-keepers of what he seems never to doubt is an excellent method for stocking an apiary. There is a very old translation of the passage in the fourth book of the Georgics relating to these self-generated bees, which is worth quoting, if only on account of its quaint mediæval savour. “First, there is found a place, small and narrowed for the very use, shut in by a leetle tiled roof and closed walles, through which the light comes in askant through four windowes, facing the four pointes of the compass. Next is found a two-year-old bull-calf, whose crooked horns bee just beginning to bud; the beast his nose-holes and breathing are stopped, in spite of his much kicking; and after he hath been thumped to death, his entrails, bruised as they bee, melt inside his entire skinne. This done, he is left in the place afore-prepared, and under his sides are put bitts of boughes, and thyme, and fresh-plucked rosemarie. And all this doethe take place at the season when the zephyrs are first curling the waters, before the meades bee ruddy with their spring-tide colours, and before the swallow, that leetle chatterer, doethe hang her nest again the beam. In time, the warm humour beginneth to ferment inside the soft bones of the carcase; and wonderful to tell, there appear creatures, footless at first, but which soon getting unto themselves winges, mingle together and buzz about, joying more and more in their airy life. At last, burst they forth, thick as rain-droppes from a summer cloude, thick as arrowes, the which leave the clanging stringes when the nimble Parthians make their first battel onset.”

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