the honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring like the dove from noah's ark, and it is not till after many days that she brings back the olive leaf, which in this case is a pellet of golden pollen upon each hip, usually obtained from the alder or the swamp willow. in a country where maple sugar is made, the bees get their first taste of sweet from the sap as it flows from the spiles, or as it dries and is condensed upon the sides of the buckets. they will sometimes, in their eagerness, come about the boiling place and be overwhelmed by the steam and the smoke. but bees appear to be more eager for bread in the spring than for honey; their supply of this article, perhaps, does not keep as well as their stores of the latter, hence fresh bread, in the shape of new pollen, is diligently sought for. my bees get their first supplies from the catkins of the willows. how quickly they find them out. if but one catkin opens anywhere within range, a bee is on hand that very hour to rifle it, and it is a most pleasing experience to stand near the hive some mild april day and see them come pouring in with their little baskets packed with this first fruitage of the spring. they will have new bread now; they have been to mill in good earnest; see their dusty coats, and the golden grist they bring home with them.
when a bee brings pollen into the hive, he advances to the cell in which it is to be deposited and kicks it off as one might his overalls or rubber boots, making one foot help the other; then he walks off without ever looking behind him; another bee, one of the indoor hands, comes along and rams it down with his head and packs it into the cell as the dairymaid packs butter into a firkin.
the first spring wild-flowers, whose shy faces among the dry leaves and rocks are so welcome, yield no honey. the anemone, the hepatica, the bloodroot, the arbutus, the numerous violets, the spring beauty, the corydalis, etc., woo lovers of nature, but do not woo the honey-loving bee. it requires more sun and warmth to develop the saccharine element, and the beauty of these pale striplings of the woods and groves is their sole and sufficient excuse for being. the arbutus, lying low and keeping green all winter, attains to perfume, but not to honey.
the first honey is perhaps obtained from the flowers of the red maple and the golden willow. the latter sends forth a wild, delicious perfume. the sugar maple blooms a little later, and from its silken tassels a rich nectar is gathered. my bees will not label these different varieties for me as i really wish they would. honey from the maples, a tree so clean and wholesome, and full of such virtues every way, would be something to put one's tongue to. or that from the blossoms of the apple, the peach, the cherry, the quince, the currant,—one would like a card of each of these varieties to note their peculiar qualities. the apple-blossom is very important to the bees. a single swarm has been known to gain twenty pounds in weight during its continuance. bees love the ripened fruit, too, and in august and september will suck themselves tipsy upon varieties such as the sops-of-wine.
the interval between the blooming of the fruit-trees and that of the clover and the raspberry is bridged over in many localities by the honey locust. what a delightful summer murmur these trees send forth at this season. i know nothing about the quality of the honey, but it ought to keep well. but when the red raspberry blooms, the fountains of plenty are unsealed indeed; what a commotion about the hives then, especially in localities where it is extensively cultivated, as in places along the hudson. the delicate white clover, which begins to bloom about the same time, is neglected; even honey itself is passed by for this modest colorless, all but odorless flower. a field of these berries in june sends forth a continuous murmur like that of an enormous hive. the honey is not so white as that obtained from clover but it is easier gathered; it is in shallow cups while that of the clover is in deep tubes. the bees are up and at it before sunrise, and it takes a brisk shower to drive them in. but the clover blooms later and blooms everywhere, and is the staple source of supply of the finest quality of honey. the red clover yields up its stores only to the longer proboscis of the bumble-bee, else the bee pasturage of our agricultural districts would be unequaled. i do not know from what the famous honey of chamouni in the alps is made, but it can hardly surpass our best products. the snow-white honey of anatolia in asiatic turkey, which is regularly sent to constantinople for the use of the grand seignior and the ladies of his seraglio, is obtained from the cotton plant, which makes me think that the white clover does not flourish these. the white clover is indigenous with us; its seeds seem latent in the ground, and the application of certain stimulants to the soil, such as wood ashes, causes them to germinate and spring up.
the rose, with all its beauty and perfume, yields no honey to the bee, unless the wild species be sought by the bumble-bee.
among the humbler plants, let me not forget the dandelion that so early dots the sunny slopes, and upon which the bee languidly grazes, wallowing to his knees in the golden but not over-succulent pasturage. from the blooming rye and wheat the bee gathers pollen, also from the obscure blossoms of indian corn. among weeds, catnip is the great favorite. it lasts nearly the whole season and yields richly. it could no doubt be profitably cultivated in some localities, and catnip honey would be a novelty in the market. it would probably partake of the aromatic properties of the plant from which it was derived.
among your stores of honey gathered before midsummer, you may chance upon a card, or mayhap only a square inch or two of comb, in which the liquid is as transparent as water, of a delicious quality, with a slight flavor of mint. this is the product of the linden or basswood, of all the trees in our forest the one most beloved by the bees. melissa, the goddess of honey, has placed her seal upon this tree. the wild swarms in the woods frequently reap a choice harvest from it. i have seen a mountain side thickly studded with it, its straight, tall, smooth, light-gray shaft carrying its deep-green crown far aloft, like the tulip-tree or the maple.
in some of the northwestern states there are large forests of it, and the amount of honey reported stored by strong swarms in this section during the time the tree is in bloom is quite incredible. as a shade and ornamental tree the linden is fully equal to the maple, and if it were as extensively planted and cared for, our supplies of virgin honey would be greatly increased. the famous honey of lithuania in russia is the product of the linden.
it is a homely old stanza current among bee folk that—
"a swarm of bees in may
is worth a load of hay;
a swarm of bees in june
is worth a silver spoon;
but a swarm in july
is not worth a fly."
a swarm in may is indeed a treasure; it is, like an april baby, sure to thrive, and will very likely itself send out a swarm a month or two later; but a swarm in july is not to be despised; it will store no clover or linden honey for the "grand seignior and the ladies of his seraglio," but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man's nectar, the sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. buckwheat honey is the black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in it. it lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when at a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake. bread with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good fortune. it is not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the same class of goods as herrick's
"nut-brown mirth and russet wit."
how the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the blooming plant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight the apiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.
yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attracts the bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or to heliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon. in september they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enough sweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. the purple asters and the golden-rod are about all that remain to them.
bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a great advantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been the custom from the earliest times in the old world. some enterprising person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient egyptians, who had floating apiaries on the nile, has tried the experiment of floating several hundred colonies north on the mississippi, starting from new orleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort of perpetual may or june, the chief attraction being the blossoms of the river willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. some of the bees were no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured must have been very great. in september they should have begun the return trip, following the retreating summer south.
it is the making of the wax that costs with the bee. as with the poet, the form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that fills it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb in both cases. the honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he must make himself—must evolve from his own inner consciousness. when wax is to be made the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and retire into their chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religious rite; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long lines that hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the miracle to transpire. after about twenty-four hours their patience is rewarded, the honey is turned into wax, minute scales of which are secreted from between the rings of the abdomen of each bee; this is taken off and from it the comb is built up. it is calculated that about twenty-five pounds of honey are used in elaborating one pound of comb, to say nothing of the time that is lost. hence the importance in an economical point of view, of a recent device by which the honey is extracted and the comb returned intact to the bees. but honey without the comb is the perfume without the rose,—it is sweet merely, and soon degenerates into candy. half the delectableness is in breaking down these frail and exquisite walls yourself, and tasting the nectar before it has lost its freshness by the contact with the air. then the comb is a sort of shield or foil that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed by the shock of the sweet.
the drones have the least enviable time of it. their foothold in the hive is very precarious. they look like the giants, the lords of the swarm, but they are really the tools. their loud, threatening hum has no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the more conspicuous marks for the birds.
toward the close of the season, say in july or august, the fiat goes forth that the drones must die; there is no further use for them. then the poor creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about, trying to hide in corners and by-ways. there is no loud, defiant humming now, but abject fear seizes them. they cower like hunted criminals. i have seen a dozen or more of them wedge themselves into a small space between the glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them or where they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. they will also crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. but sooner or later they are all killed or kicked out. the drone makes no resistance, except to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your waistbands with his sting, the odds are greatly against you.
it is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. if the entire population of spain or great britain were the offspring of one mother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which a royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else give up the fashion of royalty. all the bees in the hive have a common parentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of jelly. in certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee, enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a queen. but ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queen is kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with the swarm. later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the reigning queen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal scion in the hive. at this time both the queens, the one a prisoner and the other at large, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like note that any ear will at once recognize. this challenge, not being allowed to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day or two by the abdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the swarm, and her successor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time, abdicates in favor of the next younger. when the bees have decided that no more swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her stiletto upon her unhatched sisters. cases have been known where two queens issued at the same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged by the workers, who formed a ring about them, but showed no preference, and recognized the victor as the lawful sovereign. for these and many other curious facts we are indebted to the blind huber.
it is worthy of note that the position of the queen cells is always vertical, while that of the drones and workers is horizontal; majesty stands on its head, which fact may be a part of the secret.
the notion has always very generally prevailed that the queen of the bees is an absolute ruler, and issues her royal orders to willing subjects. hence napoleon the first sprinkled the symbolic bees over the imperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty; and in the country of the pharaohs the bee was used as the emblem of a people sweetly submissive to the orders of its king. but the fact is, a swarm of bees is an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can find no warrant in their example. the power and authority are entirely vested in the great mass, the workers. they furnish all the brains and foresight of the colony, and administer its affairs. their word is law, and both king and queen must obey. they regulate the swarming, and give the signal for the swarm to issue from the hive; they select and make ready the tree in the woods and conduct the queen to it.
the peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the fact that she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish her as a mother and not as a sovereign. she is the sole female bee in the hive, and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. deprived of their queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm loses all heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in the hive.
the common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to be disposed of they starve her to death; and the queen herself will sting nothing but royalty—nothing but a rival queen.
the queen, i say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. it is an event to distinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it awakens a thrill. before you have seen a queen you wonder if this or that bee, which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but when you once really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment. you know that is the queen. that long, elegant, shining, feminine-looking creature can be none less than royalty. how beautifully her body tapers, how distinguished she looks, how deliberate her movements! the bees do not fall down before her, but caress her and touch her person. the drones or males, are large bees too, but coarse, blunt, broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. there is but one fact or incident in the life of the queen that looks imperial and authoritative: huber relates that when the old queen is restrained in her movements by the workers, and prevented from destroying the young queens in their cells, she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters a note that strikes every bee motionless, and makes every head bow; while this sound lasts not a bee stirs, but all look abashed and humbled, yet whether the emotion is one of fear, or reverence, or of sympathy with the distress of the queen mother, is hard to determine. the moment it ceases and she advances again toward the royal cells, the bees bite and pull and insult her as before.
i always feel that i have missed some good fortune if i am away from home when my bees swarm. what a delightful summer sound it is; how they come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees each striving to get out first; it is as when the dam gives way and lets the waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air, and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye and a soft chorus of myriad musical sounds to the ear. this way and that way they drift, now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick about some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other point, till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments the whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps as large as a two-gallon measure. here they will hang from one to three or four hours, or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up, when, if they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up and off. in hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen the enterprise miscarries at once. one day i shook a swarm from a small pear-tree into a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath the tree, and put the hive over it. the bees presently all crawled up into it, and all seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when i observed that something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and to rush about in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and all returned to the parent stock. on lifting up the pan, i found beneath it the queen with three or four other bees. she had been one of the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and i had set it upon her. i conveyed her tenderly back to the hive, but either the accident terminated fatally with her or else the young queen had been liberated in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it was ten days before the swarm issued a second time.
no one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the woods. yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either before or on the day the swarm issues. for all bees are wild bees and incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature and take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated. years upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no appreciable effect towards their final, permanent domestication. that every new swarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact that they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an enterprise, and that a passing cloud or a sudden wind, after the bees are in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive. or an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water, will quickly cause them to change their plans. i would not even say but that, when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, now entirely discredited by regular bee-keepers but still resorted to by unscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and creating an uproar generally, might not be without good results. certainly not by drowning the "orders" of the queen, but by impressing the bees as with some unusual commotion in nature. bees are easily alarmed and disconcerted, and i have known runaway swarms to be brought down by a farmer ploughing in the field who showered them with handfuls of loose soil.
i love to see a swarm go off—if it is not mine, and if mine must go i want to be on hand to see the fun. it is a return to first principles again by a very direct route. the past season i witnessed two such escapes. one swarm had come out the day before, and, without alighting, had returned to the parent hive—some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or may be the queen had found her wings too weak. the next day they came out again, and were hived. but something offended them, or else the tree in the woods—perhaps some royal old maple or birch holding its head high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers and galleries—had too many attractions; for they were presently discovered filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around. gradually they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and they had become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a more compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex of bees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as a pivot,—over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heart of the mountain, about a mile distant,—slow at first, so that the youth who gave chase kept up with them, but increasing their speed till only a fox hound could have kept them in sight. i saw their pursuer laboring up the side of the mountain; saw his white shirt-sleeves gleam as he entered the woods; but he returned a few hours afterward without any clew as to the particular tree in which they had taken refuge out of the ten thousand that covered the side of the mountain.
the other swarm came out about one o'clock of a hot july day, and at once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw neither dirt nor water. the house was situated on a steep side-hill. behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them up this hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of wind at least; for it soon became evident that their course lay in this direction. determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase, i threw off my coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly organized and under way. the route soon led me into a field of standing rye, every spear of which held its head above my own. plunging recklessly forward, my course marked to those watching from below by the agitated and wriggling grain, i emerged from the miniature forest just in time to see the runaways disappearing over the top of the hill, some fifty rods in advance of me. lining them as well as i could, i soon reached the hill-top, my breath utterly gone and the perspiration streaming from every pore of my skin. on the other side the country opened deep and wide. a large valley swept around to the north, heavily wooded at its head and on its sides. it became evident at once that the bees had made good their escape, and that whether they had stopped on one side of the valley or the other, or had indeed cleared the opposite mountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was entirely problematical. i turned back, therefore, thinking of the honey-laden tree that some of these forests would hold before the falling of the leaf.
i heard of a youth in the neighborhood, more lucky than myself on a like occasion. it seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm, whose route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the summit, hat in hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him. presently he noticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting on his arm; and in almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the whole swarm had followed the queen into his hat. being near a stone wall, he coolly deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself from the accommodating bees, and returned for a hive. the explanation of this singular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such long and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very exhaustion. it is not very unusual for swarms to be thus found in remote fields, collected upon a bush or branch of a tree.
when a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual bees, as i have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward, like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind. unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or fifteen feet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles, except in crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high. the swarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen (at least at the outset) constantly going and coming. as they take a direct course, there is always some chance of following them to the tree, unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a wood, or a swamp, or a high hill, intervenes—enough chance, at any rate, to stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as their wind holds out. if the bees are successfully followed to their retreat, two plans are feasible: either to fell the tree at once, and seek to hive them, perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree that contains the cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite your neighbors, and go and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey. the former course is more business-like; but the latter is the one usually recommended by one's friends and neighbors.
perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no one is about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by some distant laborers in the field, or by some youth ploughing on the side of the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the swarm dimly whirling by overhead, and, may be, gives chase; or he may simply catch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees nothing. when he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a swarm of bees go over; and, perhaps from beneath one of the hives in the garden a black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.
they are not partial as to the kind of tree,—pine, hemlock, elm, birch, maple, hickory,—any tree with a good cavity high up or low down. a swarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive i gave them, and took up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree across an adjoining field. the entrance was a mouse-hole near the ground.
another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper and went into the cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear of a large mansion. but there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or more probably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain.
in any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainous districts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independence forms quite a large per cent. in the northern states these swarms very often perish before spring; but in such a country as florida they seem to multiply, till bee-trees are very common. in the west, also, wild honey is often gathered in large quantities. i noticed not long since, that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the coast range felled a tree that had several pailfuls in it.
one night on the potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp near the foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down, for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. another time while sitting by a waterfall in the leafless april woods i discovered a swarm in the top of a large hickory. i had the season before remarked the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of leaves concealed them from me. this time my former presentiment occurred to me, and, looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees, going out and in a large, irregular opening. in june a violent tempest of wind and rain demolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the creek into which it fell. i happened along that way two or three days after the tornado, when i saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless, that escaped the flood and those that were away when the disaster came, hanging in a small black mass to a branch high up near where their home used to be. they looked forlorn enough. if the queen was saved the remnant probably sought another tree; otherwise the bees have soon died.
i have seen bees desert their hive in the spring when it was infested with worms, or when the honey was exhausted; at such times the swarm seems to wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and perhaps in the end uniting with some other colony. in case of such union, it would be curious to know if negotiations were first opened between the parties, and if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the rights and franchises of their benefactors. it would be very like the bees to have some preliminary plan and understanding about the matter on both sides.
bees will accommodate themselves to almost any quarters, yet no hive seems to please them so well as a section of a hollow tree—"gums" as they are called in the south and west where the sweet gum grows. in some european countries the hive is always made from the trunk of a tree, a suitable cavity being formed by boring. the old-fashioned straw hive is picturesque, and a great favorite with the bees also.
the life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continually recruited. what adventures they have by flood and field, and what hair-breadth escapes! a strong swarm during the honey season loses, on an average, about four or five thousand per month, or one hundred and fifty per day. they are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders, benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, and in many nameless ways cut off or disabled. in the spring the principal mortality is from the cold. as the sun declines they get chilled before they can reach home. many fall down outside the hive, unable to get in with their burden. one may see them come utterly spent and drop hopelessly into the grass in front of their very doors. before they can rest the cold has stiffened them. i go out in april and may and pick them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm them in the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand, until they can crawl into the hive. heat is their life, and an apparently lifeless bee may be revived by warming him. i have also picked them up while rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore. it is amusing to see them come hurrying home when there is a thunderstorm approaching. they come piling in till the rain is upon them. those that are overtaken by the storm doubtless weather it as best they can in the sheltering trees or grass. it is not probable that a bee ever gets lost by wandering into strange and unknown parts. with their myriad eyes they see everything; and then, their sense of locality is very acute, is, indeed, one of their ruling traits. when a bee marks the place of his hive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of the bee-hunter's box of honey on the hills or in the woods, he returns to it as unerringly as fate.
honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than it is with us. as they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar, honey, no doubt, stood them instead. it is too rank and pungent for the modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. it demands the appetite of youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in the open air. it is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern confectionery is poison beside it. beside grape sugar, honey contains manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous substances and juices. it is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread added. the manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent vegetable extracts have rare virtues. honey promotes the excretions and dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.
hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things; and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat "bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his money," was doing a very sensible thing. epaminondas is said to have rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. the emperor augustus one day inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body so long; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without and honey within." cicero, in his "old age," classes honey with meat and milk and cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept farm-house will be supplied.
italy and greece, in fact all the mediterranean countries, appear to have been famous lands for honey. mount hymettus, mount hybla, and mount ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity, an article doubtless in nowise superior to our best products. leigh hunt's "jar of honey" is mainly distilled from sicilian history and literature, theocritus furnishing the best yield. sicily has always been rich in bees. swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many hives near their houses. the idyls of theocritus are native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—"flat-nosed bees" as he calls them in the seventh idyl—and comparisons in which comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. his goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with honey-combs, or to be inclosed in a chest like daphnis and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with which arsinoe cherishes adonis are "honey-cakes," and other tid-bits made of "sweet honey." in the country of theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when a couple are married the attendants place honey in their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.
it was fabled that homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts distilled honey; and that once when pindar lay asleep the bees dropped honey upon his lips. in the old testament the food of the promised immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about the butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and jonathan's eyes were enlightened, by partaking of some wood or wild honey: "see, i pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because i tasted a little of this honey." so far as this part of his diet was concerned, therefore, john the baptist, during his sojourn in the wilderness, his divinity school-days in the mountains and plains of judea, fared extremely well. about the other part, the locusts, or, not to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be said, though they were among the creeping and leaping things the children of israel were permitted to eat. they were probably not eaten raw, but roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground made hot by building a fire in it. the locusts and honey may have been served together, as the bedas of ceylon are said to season their meat with honey. at any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in palestine, the prophet in eating them found his account in the general weal, and in the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts, the more flowers. owing to its numerous wild-flowers and flowering shrubs, palestine has always been a famous country for bees. they deposit their honey in hollow trees as our bees do when they escape from the hive, and in holes in the rocks as ours do not. in a tropical or semi-tropical climate bees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks, but where ice and snow prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up in the trunk of a forest tree.
the best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate zone. there are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics. honey from certain districts of turkey produces headache and vomiting, and that from brazil is used chiefly as medicine. the honey of mount hymettus owes its fine quality to wild thyme. the best honey in persia and in florida is collected from the orange blossom. the celebrated honey of narbonne in the south of france is obtained from a species of rosemary. in scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather.
california honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and now takes the lead in the market. but honey is honey the world over; and the bee is the bee still. "men may degenerate," says an old traveler, "may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactories may fail, and commodities be debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will continue without change or derogation."
