Of bees

XVI.  “It remains now,” said Appius, “to rehearse the third and last act of our drama of the husbandry of the steading and to discuss the keeping of fishes.”

“The third, indeed,” exclaimed Axius, “shall we deprive ourselves of honey because in your youth you never drank mead in your own house, such was your practice of frugality?”

“He speaks the truth,” said Appius, to us, “for I was indeed left a poor orphan with two brothers and two sisters to provide for, and it was not until I had married one of them to Lucullus without portion and he had named me his heir that I began to drink mead in my own house and to supply it to my household:  but there never was a day when I did not offer it to all my guests.  But apart from that, it has been my fortune, not yours,[200] Axius, to have known these winged creatures whom nature has endowed so richly with industry and art, and that you may appreciate that I know more than you do of their almost incredible natural art, listen to what I am to say.  It will then be for Merula to develop the practice of the bee keeper, or, as the Greeks call it, [Greek:  melittourgia], as methodically as he has his other subjects.

“To begin then,[201] bees are generated partly by other bees and partly from the decaying carcase of an ox:  so Archelaus in one of his epigrams calls them

  ‘flitting offspring of decaying beef,’

and else where he says,

  ‘wasps spring from horses, bees from calves.’

“Bees are not of a solitary habit like eagles, but are of a social nature, like men, a characteristic they share with daws, but not for the same reason, for bees live in colonies, the better to work and build, while daws congregate for gossip.  Thus the life of a bee is one of intelligence and art, for man has learned from them to manufacture, to build, and to store his food:  three occupations which are not the same but are diverse in their nature, for it is one thing to provide food, another to manufacture wax and honey, and still another to build a house.  Has not each cell in a honey comb six sides, or as many as a bee has feet, the art of which arrangement appears in the teaching of the geometricians that of all polygons the hexagon covers the largest area within a circle.[202] Bees feed out of doors, but it is at home that they manufacture that which is the sweetest of all things, acceptable to gods and men alike:  for honey comb is offered on the altars and honey is served at the beginning of a dinner and again at dessert.

“Bees have institutions like our own, consisting of royalty, government and organized society.  Cleanliness in all things is their aim:  and so they never alight in any place where there is filth or an evil odour, or even where there is a strong savour of such an unguent as we may consider agreeable.  For the same reason if one who approaches them is covered with perfume,[203] they do not lick him as