PEPACTON 



but the latter devours only the drones. The workers 

 are either too small and quick for it or else it dreads 

 their sting. 



Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's 

 knowledge of the honey-bee. There is little fact 

 and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If he had 

 ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is 

 hard to see how he could have believed that the bee 

 in its flight abroad carried a gravel-stone for ballast: 



"And as when empty barks on billows float, 

 With sandy ballast sailors trim the boat; 

 So bees bear gravel -stones, whose poising weight 

 Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight;" 



or that, when two colonies made war upon each 

 other, they issued forth from their hives led by 

 their kings and fought in the air, strewing the 

 ground with the dead and dying: 



" Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain, 

 Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain." 



It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunt- 

 ing. If he had, we should have had a fifth Georgic. 

 Yet he seems to have known that bees sometimes 

 escaped to the woods : 



"Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found 

 In chambers of their own beneath the ground: 

 Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices, 

 And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees." 



