NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 131 



with whom lie lives. ' Sir, lie worships his bees. After brakfasf 

 he'll set and watch them, and I be forced to take his dinner out 

 to him. He doesn't like his bees to die can't bear to hear the 

 sound of death ; but he likes anybody else's to die. When yon 

 were stung, he laughed heartily, and said " it wasn't no 

 use for anybody to keep them spiteful bees ; he didn't do that 

 himself." He rings anybody's bees with a pot-lid and key, but 

 won't hive them himself. He coaxes 'em out, and calls 'em, "Come 

 along, little fellows, come along, little fellows." 



" His father, Luke Todman, was a very exact and religious 

 man ; one brother who was in the Life Guards died. ' Father 

 went and waked the hives ; ' he said : 



" Awake, little bee9, awake, 

 Your old master's dead, and a new one you must take." 



" 'You must wake (confer. Irish wake) the bees before 

 the sun rises next morning after the death. If they are not told 

 of the death of their master the bees pine away and die. Harry 

 Prior's first wife died and her bees with her ; Harry never told 

 them, and he never had any since. He never waked them ; and 

 since that he went shares with Master Blunden, at Eogate, in a 

 hive of bees, and he died, and the bees were never waked, and 

 they died.' 



" People certainly seem to get inured to the bee-poison after a 

 time, as sailors, from practice, do not feel musquitos, but per 

 contra suffer much from the fleas on land. Nerve will enable 

 people to do almost anything with bees, but if it flags for a 

 moment you will receive, as I know to my cost fourteen years 

 ago, many stings at once. Is it possible that some are so thick- 

 skinned that the sting cannot penetrate ; or that the virtue of 

 being sting-proof is like immunity from some fever poisons, a 

 peculiarity handed down from ancestors. 



" It is certain that White's idiot-boy could have felt nothing 

 of the sting of a bee. 



" I have little doubi that the idiot in question had a skin too 

 thick for the bees' stings, and that the bees knew it. Bees know 

 in a moment when you begin to fear them you communicate 

 your panic to them, and they stiletto you to their own death, 

 disembowelling themselves. 



" I have for nearly twenty years kept bees, and beyond mere 

 rule of thumb handling of them am satisfied that I know next 

 to nothing about them, but can only echo, ore rotundissimo, 



" apibus quanta experientia parcis." 



A magnificent work has lately been published in French (J. 



