THE PASTORAL BEES. 31 



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 



