86 BEES. 
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 ex- 
eretions and dissolves the glutinous and starchy im- 
pedimenta 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 sen- 
sible thing. Epaminondas is said to have rarely eaten 
anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augus- 
tus 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 pro- 
duced what may be called the classic honey of an- 
tiquity, 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 al- 
ways 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 Theoc- 
ritus are native to the island in this respect, and 
abound in bees — “ flat-nosed bees” as he calls them 
