APIDyE — BEES 189 



learned that this is not an individual superstition, but one 

 that pretty generally prevails. 



The Apiarians of Bedfordshire, England, have a custom 

 of, as they call it, ringing their swarms with the door-key and 

 the frying-pan ; and if a swarm settles on another's premises, 

 it is irrecoverable by the owner, unless he can prove the 

 ringing, but it becomes the property of that person upon 

 whose premises it settles.^ 



The practice of beating pans, and making a great noise 

 to induce a swarm of Bees to settle, is, at least, as old as 

 the time of Yirgil. He thus mentions it: 



But when thou seest a swarming cloud arise, ^ 



That sweeps aloft, and darkens all the skies: 



The motions of their hasty flight attend; 



And know to floods, or woods, their airy march they bend. 



Then melfoil beat, and honey-suckles pound, 



"With these alluring savors strew the ground, 



And mix with tinkling brass the cymbal's drowning sound. 2 



But concerning this practice, Langstroth says : " It is prob- 

 ably not a whit more efficacious than the hideous noises of 

 some savage tribes, who, imagining that the sun, in an 

 eclipse, has been swallowed by an enormous dragon, resort 

 to such means to compel his snakeship to disgorge their 

 favorite luminary.'" 



Dr. Toner, the author of that very interesting little work, 

 "Maternal Instinct or Love," informs me that when a boy 

 he witnessed a mode of alluring a swarm of Bees to settle, 

 performed by a German man and his wife, which struck him 

 at the time as being remarkable, and which was as follows : 

 Having first put some pig-manure upon the hive into which 



tions in the price of wheat were intimately connected with the rise 

 and fall of the tides. So impressed was he with this idea, that he 

 ever afterward yearly bought that particular almanac, and prophe- 

 sied from it to his neighbors the probable value of their coming 

 crops of wheat. On Sunday, he would walk fifteen and twenty 

 miles through the country, to examine the different wheat-fields, 

 and to afford him a topic of conversation for the ensuing week. 

 But Napoleon was his principal study and his greatest mania. On 

 him he would talk for hours, on the slightest provocation. The 

 history of Bonaparte and his campaigns, which he only read, was 

 an old German one. 



1 Mag. of Nat. Hist., ii. 209. 



2 Geog., Dry den's Trans., iv. 82-9. 



3 On the Honey- Bee, p. 113. 



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