Читать книгу The Lore of the Honey-Bee - Edwardes Tickner - Страница 3

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“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.”

For a study in the persistence of delusions, this affords us some very promising material. In the first place, the generation of bees from putrescent matter is, and must always have been, an impossibility. If there is one thing that the honey-bee abhors more than another, it is carrion of any description. Indeed, putrid odours will often induce a stock of bees to forsake its hive altogether; so it cannot even be supposed that bees would venture near the scene of Virgil’s malodorous experiment, and thus give rise to the belief that they were nurtured there. But not only was this practice a recognised and established thing in Virgil’s time, but entire credence was placed in it throughout the Middle Ages down, in fact, to so late a time as the seventeenth century. It is on record that the experiment was carried through with complete success by a certain Mr. Carew, of Anthony, in Cornwall, at an even later date still.

The practice, moreover, was of infinitely greater antiquity than even Virgil supposed. He was probably right in giving it an Egyptian origin, and this alone may date it back thousands of years. In Egypt the custom had a curious variant. The ox was placed underground, with its horns above the surface of the soil. Then, when the process of generation was presumed to be complete, the tips of the horns were sawn off, and the bees are said to have issued from them, as out of two funnels.

Nearly all the ancient writers, with the exception of Aristotle, mention the practice in some form or other. Varro, writing half a century before Virgil, says, “it is from rotten oxen that are born the sweet bees, the mothers of honey.” Ovid gives the story of the Egyptian shepherd Aristæus as enlarged upon by Virgil, and adds some speculations of his own. He suggests that the soul of the ox is converted into numberless bee-souls as a punishment to the ox for his lifelong depredations amongst the flowers and herbage, the bee being a creature that can only do good to, and cannot injure, vegetation.

Manifestly, where there is so general, and so widely independent a corroboration of a story, some explanation must exist, which will alike bear out the truth and condone, or at least extenuate, the error. A careful examination of the various accounts of bee-swarms having been produced from decaying animal matter reveals one common omission in regard to them. All the writers are agreed that dense clouds of bee-like insects are evolved; and speak of these as escaping into the air and flying off, presumably in the immediate quest of honey. But no one bears testimony to honey having been actually gathered by these insects, nor is it recorded that they were ever induced to take possession of a hive, as ordinary swarms of bees will readily do. They are spoken of more as enriching the neighbourhood generally, by augmenting the number of bees abroad, than as conducing to the well-being of any particular bee-owner.

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.