[Footnote 209:  Reading Apiastro.  This is the Melissa officinalis of Linnaeus.  Cf.  Pliny, XX, 45 and XXI, 86.]

[Footnote 210:  Bee keepers attribute to Reaumur the invention of the modern glass observation hive, which has made possible so much of our knowledge of the bee, but it may be noted that Pliny (H.N. XXI, 47) mentions hives of “lapis specularis,” some sort of talc, contrived for the purpose of observing bees at work.  The great advance in bee hives is, however, the sectional construction attributed to Langstroth and developed in America by Root.]

[Footnote 211:  Columella, (IX, 14) referring to the myth of the generation of bees in the carcase of an ox (out of which Virgil made the fable of the pastor Aristaeus in the Fourth Georgic), explains the practice mentioned in the text with the statement “hic enim quasi quadam cognatione generis maxime est apibus aptus.”  The plastering of wicker hives with ox dung persisted and is recommended in the seventeenth century editions of the Maison Rustique.]

[Footnote 212:  Reading seditiosum.]

[Footnote 213:  This is a mistake upon which Aristotle could have corrected Varro.]

[Footnote 214:  After studying the commentators on this obscure passage, I have elected to follow the emendation of Ursinus, which, although Keil sneers at its license, has the advantage of making sense.]

[Footnote 215:  Sinapis arvensis, Linn.]

[Footnote 216:  Sium sisarum, Linn.]

[Footnote 217:  The philosophy of the bee is not as selfish as that human principle which Varro attributes to them.  The hive does not send forth its “youth” to found a colony, but, on the contrary, abandons its home and its accumulated store of wealth to its youth and itself ventures forth under the leadership of the old queen to face the uncertainties of the future, leaving only a small band of old bees to guard the hive and rear the young until the new queen shall have supplied a new population.]

[Footnote 218:  Reading imbecilliores.]

[Footnote 219:  Pliny (H.N.  IX, 81) relates that this loan was made to supply the banquet on the occasion of one of the triumphs of Caesar the dictator, but Pliny puts the loan at six thousand fishes.]

[Footnote 220:  It is impossible to translate this pun into English, dulcis being the equivalent of both “fresh” and “agreeable,” and amara of “salt” and “disagreeable.”  A French translator would have at his command doux and amer.]

[Footnote 221:  Cf.  Pliny (H.N.  II, 96):  “In Lydia the islands called Calaminae are not only driven about by the wind, but may even be pushed at pleasure from place to place, by which means many people saved themselves in the Mithridatic war.  There are some small islands in the Nymphaeus called the Dancers, because, when choruses are sung, they move in tune with the measure of the music.”]