1872.] 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



279 



Others like soldiers, armed iu their stints, 



Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds; 



Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home 



To the tent-royal of their emperor : 



Who, envied iu his majesty, surveys 



The sinsjing masons building roof of gold ; 



The civil citizens kneading up the honey ; 



The poor mechanic porters crowding in 



Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate ; 



The sad ey'd justice, with his surly hum, 



Delivering o'er to executors pale 



The lazy yawning drone." — Henry V, 1, 2. 



Nothing escaped the wonderful vision of this 

 "myriad minded" man, and its j^ertincnt appli- 

 cation. This description, although certainly not 

 technically accurate, is a superb broad sketch, 

 and shows how well he was acquainted with the 

 natural history and habits of the domestic bee. 



The curiosity bees have attracted from time 

 immemorial, and the wonders of their economy 

 elicited by the observation and study of modern 

 investigators, is but a grateful return for the 

 benefits derived to man from their jjersevering as- 

 siduity and skill. It is the just homage of reason 

 to perfect instinct running closely parallel to its 

 own wonderful attributes. Indeed, so complex 

 are many of the operations of this instinct, as to 

 have induced the surmise of a i^ositive afiflnity to 

 reason, instead of its being a mere analogy, 

 working blindly and without reflection. The 

 felicity of the adaptation of the hexagonal waxen 

 cells, and the skill of the construction of the 

 comb to their purposes, has occupied the obstruse 

 calculations of profound mathematicians ; and 

 since human ingenuity has devised modes of in- 

 vestigating, unobserved, the various proceedings 

 of the interior of the hive, wonder has grown 

 still greater, and admiration has reached its 

 climax. 



The intimate connection of "bees" with 

 nature's elegancies, the flowers, is an association 

 which links them agreeably to our regard, for 

 each suggests the other ; their vivacity and 

 music giving animation and variety to what 

 might otherwise pall by beautiful but inanimate 

 attractions. When we comldne with this the 

 services which bees perform in their eager pur- 

 suits, our admiration extends beyond them to 

 their great originator, who, by such apparently 

 small means, accomplishes so simply yet com- 

 pletely, a most important object of creation. 



That bees were cultivated by man in the 

 earliest conditions of his existence, possibly 

 whilst his yet limited family was still occupying 

 the primitive cradle of the race at Hindoo Koosh, 

 or on the fertile slopes of the Himalayas, or upon 

 the more distant table land or plateau of Thibet, 

 or in the delicious vales of Cashmere, or wherever 

 it might have been, somewhere widely away to 

 the east of the Caspian Sea, — is a very probable 

 supposition. Accident furthered by curiosity, 

 would have early led to the discovery of stores of 

 honey which the assiduity of the bees had 

 hoarded ; its agreeable odor would have induced 

 further search, which would have strengthened 

 the possession by keener observation, and have 

 led in due course to the fixing of them iu his im- 

 mediate vicinity. 



To this remote period, possibly not so early as 



the discovery of the treasures of the bee, may be 

 assigned also the first domestication of the 

 animals useful to man, many of which are still 

 found in those districts in all their primitive 

 wildness. The discovery and cultivation of the 

 cereal plants will also date from this early age. 

 The domestication of animals has never been 

 satisfactorily explained, but all inquiry seems to 

 l)oint to those regions as the native land, both of 

 them, and of the graminm which produce our 

 grain ; for Heinzlemau, Linnaeus' enthusiastic 

 disciple, found there those grasses still growing 

 wild, which have not been found elsewhere iu a 

 natural state. 



Thus, long before the three great branches of 

 the human race, the Aryan, Shemetic, and Turo- 

 nian, took their divergent courses from the pro- 

 creative nest which was to populate the earth, 

 they were already endowed from their patrimony 

 with the best gifts nature could present to them ; 

 and they were thus fitted, in their estrangement 

 from their home, with the requirements, which 

 the vicissitudes they might have to contend with 

 in their migrations, most needed. They would 

 eventually have settled into varying conditions, 

 differently modified by time acting conjunctively 

 with climate and position, until in the lapse of 

 years, and the changes the earth has since under- 

 gone, the stamp impressed by these causes, which 

 would have been originally evanescent, became 

 indelible. That but one language was originally 

 theirs, the researches of philology distinctly 

 prove, by finding a language still more ancient 

 than its Aryan, Shemetic, and Turonian deriva- 

 tives. From this elder language these all spring, 

 their common origin being deduced from the 

 analogies extant in each. These investiga- 

 tions are confirmed by the Scriptural account 

 "That the whole earth was of one language and 

 of one speech," previous to the Floo^I, and it 

 describes the first migration as coincident with 

 the subsidence of the waters. 



That animals have been domesticated in a very 

 early stage of man's existence, we have distinct 

 proof in many recent geological discoveries, and 

 all these discoveries show the same animals to 

 have been in every instance subjugated ; tiius 

 pointing to a primitive and earlier domestication 

 in the region where both were originally pro- 

 duced. That pasture land was provided i^or the 

 sustenance of those animals, they being chiefly 

 herbivorous, is a necessary conclusion. Thence 

 ensues the fair deduction that phanerogamous or 

 flower-bearing plants coexisted, and bees, conse- 

 quently, and necessarily too — thus participating 

 reciprocal advantages, they receiving from those 

 plants sustenance, and giving them fertility. 



Claiming thus this very high antiquity for 

 man's nutritive "bee," which was of far earlier 

 utility to him than the silk worm, whose labor 

 demanded a very advanced condition of skill and 

 civilization, to be made available ; it is perfectly 

 consistent, and indeed needful, to claim the sim- 

 ultaneous existence of all the bees' allies. The 

 earliest Shemetic and Aryan records, the Book 

 of Job, tiie Vedas, the Egyptian sculptures and 

 papyri, as well as tlie poems of Homer, con- 

 firm the early cultivatinn of bees by man for 

 domestic uses ; and their frequent representa- 



