190 APID.^ BEES. 



they wished the Bees to go, they ran to and fro under the 

 swarm, singing a monotonous German hymn; and this they 

 continued till the Bees were settled and hived. 



Another strange mode of alluring Bees into a new hive is 

 practiced near Gloucester, England, but only when all the 

 usual ways of preparing hives fail ; it is this : When a swarm 

 is to be hived, instead of moistening the inside of the hive 

 with honey, or sugar and water, the Bee-master throws into 

 it, inverted, about a pint of beans, which he causes a sow to 

 devour, and immediately then, it is said, will the Bees take 

 to it.^ 



Pliny, as follows, incidentally mentions another curious 

 mode of preparing the hives to best suit the Bees : "Touch- 

 ing Baulme, which the Greeks call Melittis or Melissophyl- 

 lon : if Bee-hives be rubbed all over and besmeared with the 

 juice thereof, the Bees will never go away; for there is 

 not a flower whereof they be more desirous and faine than 

 of it. "2 



Borlase, in his Antiquities of Cornwall, p. 168, tells us of 

 another strange practice in the hiving of Bees. He says : 

 "The Cornish, to this day, invoke the spirit of Browny, 

 when their Bees swarm ; and they think that their crying 

 Browny, Browny, will prevent them from returning into 

 the former hive, and make them pitch and form a new 

 colony."^ 



The Rev. Thomas P. Hunt, of Wyoming, Pa., has devised 

 an amusing plan, by which he says he can, at all times, pre- 

 vent a swarm of Bees from leaving his premises. Before his 

 stocks swarm, he collects a number of dead Bees, and, string- 

 ing them with a needle and thread, as worms are strung for 

 catching eels, makes of them a ball about the size of an egg, 

 leaving a few strands loose. By carrying — fastened to a 

 pole — this "Bee-bob^^ about his Apiary, when the Bees are 

 swarming, or by placing it in some central position, he in- 

 variably secures every swarm.* 



The barbarous practice of killing Bees for their honey, 

 not yet entirely abolished, did not exist in the time of Aris- 

 totle, Yarro, Columella, and Pliny. The old cultivators 



1 X. and q., 2cl Ser., ix. 443. 



2 Nni. Hist., xxi. 20, Holl Trans., p. lOH. 



* Quot. in Brand's P^p. Antiq., iii. 225. 



* liDiigstrotii on the I[onei/-B''c.. p. 182. 



i 



