J2V THE TIME OF VIEGIL 169 



place of the "leaky, draughty" basket-work skeps with which he was 

 familiar, he would find cause for amazement. In his time, the bee- 

 keeper carried for his protection in the apiary an ineffective brazier of 

 coals; to-day, when we lift the lid from a hive, we quell the turbulent 

 swarm within by a few puffs from a long-nosed, bellows-fitted smoker. 

 Instead of encountering an irregular mass of unequal, crooked pieces 

 of honeycomb built firmly to the sides and bottom of the skep, and 

 affording no chance whatever for further examination unless cut ruth- 

 lessly from their foundations, in which case the flowing honey from the 

 pierced cells would drown many of the swarm, we now find either eight 

 or ten oblong wooden frames, each enclosing a straight sheet of 

 hexagonal-celled honeycomb. Upon the surfaces of these combs the bees 

 live, and in their cells they store -the honey and raise the young bees. 

 Thus at a moment's notice, and without in the least disturbing any 

 function of the swarm, we can study the whole economy of the hive, 

 whereas, hampered both by his lack of appliances and by the medieval 

 and impracticable interior of the hive, Virgil must either have suffocated 

 the swarm with acrid fumes in order to subdue it or have drowned it in 

 the flowing honey of the broken combs. 



Though he knew much about the life of the swarm, and understood 

 well the different labors into which the toil of the hive is divided, his 

 knowledge was thus of necessity gained largely by inference, without the 

 aid of ocular proof. He might see the sentinels stationed at the 

 entrance of the hive to intercept any robbers or bewildered strangers 

 who might try to enter; he might also see the homecoming bees alight- 

 ing at the threshold, pausing an instant to balance themselves, then 

 darting into the hive. But he could never follow upon their track, as 

 we can, to see them storing their loads of nectar in the half -filled cells, 

 or placing in the compartments reserved for the purpose the tiny pellets 

 of bright colored pollen, carried home in the little pouches upon their 

 thighs. 



Nor could he watch the deeper interests of the hive unfold them- 

 selves. The queen, attended by her little retinue of caretakers, goes 

 about the combs performing her one duty of laying her eggs, one in the 

 bottom of each empty cell, the male eggs in the drone cells, the female 

 in the worker cells. One cohort of workers cares for the brood, supply- 

 ing royal jelly for the nourishment of the embryo queens, if it be the 

 swarming season; and feeding the tiny milky worker and drone grub9 

 which have hatched from the three-day old eggs. Such of these grubs 

 as have reached the proper age are sealed over with a porous capping 

 under which they grow and change form until about the twenty-first 

 day from the laying of the eggs, when the perfect, newborn bees, still 

 gray and fuzzy, chew the waxen coverlets from their cells and traverse 

 with slow, clinging crawl the comb about them. Other workers keep 



VOL. LXXXV.— 12. 



