and Varieties of the Honey-Bee. 273 



Bees found in Italy and Egypt, in Greece and Asia Minor, being 

 specifically identical with the Apis mellifica. 



The intimate connexion of the Bee with the mythology of the 

 ancients, and especially with that of the Greeks, furnishes a 

 certain proof of the high value put upon this insect by them, 

 and at the same time demonstrates that it must have existed 

 amongst them from time immemorial. Of all those natural 

 products which the Greeks represented their deities as making 

 use of in Olympus, or regarded as direct presents from the 

 deities to mankind, we may be sure that they were not intro- 

 duced from without at any determinable historical period. The 

 origin of the Bee is carried back by Nicander of Colophon to the 

 age of Saturn, in which, as is well known, the earth " flowed with 

 milk and honey." By others it is brought into immediate con- 

 nexion with the youngest dynasty of deities, as especially in the 

 narrative of Euhemerus of Alexandria, according to whom, at 

 the birth of Jupiter, the Curetes performed an armed dance, by 

 the noise of which the Bees produced on the Island of Ceos by 

 the hornets and the sun were attracted into Crete, and induced 

 to feed the new-born god with honey, which they collected as 

 the dew of heaven. In gratitude for this, according to Diodorus, 

 Jupiter afterwards gave them a bronze or golden-bronze colour ; 

 that is, he gave them the colour of the noblest metal. Ovid 

 applies a somewhat similar myth to Bacchus*. 



Whatever value these myths may possess as historical docu- 

 ments, the customs founded upon them and continued for cen- 

 turies and perhaps thousands of years, and the representations 

 (such as sculptures and coins) which have come down to us, 

 may be taken as evidence of them. Thus we have, in historical 

 times, the Nephalia, in which honey was offered as one of the 

 costliest sacrifices; and figures of the Bee occur upon the coins 

 of several Greek cities, and, amongst others, upon those of 

 the Island of Ceos. From Homer we learn that the Bee, by its 

 production of honey, was closely connected with daily life from 

 a period of high antiquity; and, from the fact that Homer enters 

 into such full details upon everything which appears somewhat 

 out of the ordinary way, we may be sure that he would not have 

 referred to honey so briefly as he doesf, if both it and the insect 

 producing it had not been of every-day occurrence, but intro- 

 duced shortly before his time. Against such an introduction, 

 which could only have taken- place from Asia Minor or Egypt, 

 we have also Cicero's statement that, in the time of Xerxes, the 

 Attic honey of Mount Hymettus was celebrated even in Asia; 

 and Xenophon's narrative J of the poisoning of his soldiers by 



* Fasti, lib. iii. vv. /39-/44. f See Iliad, xi. v. 630, 



X Anabasis, lib. iv. cap. 8. 



