Oct.,iQifi Bullet ill of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 71 



In a later fargard of the Avesta it explained that when the Daevas 

 of Ahriman flew away for refuge to the cold lands they took 

 their wasps with them. They retired to the territory extending 

 west indefinitely from the Caspian. In classic Persian there are 

 many enumerations of tribes of Iran and Turan, most of which 

 take the name of some animal. Flattering names like Lion, 

 Tiger, Swift Horses, etc., generally belong to some tribe of Iran. 

 Those of Turan include the Hyrcani, wolves ; Make or Myki, 

 either flies or ants ; and the Derbices, literally " wasp." The 

 races of Turan controlled the northern world. The nomadic 

 race of the wasps of Turan* forbade Greek invasion north of 

 the Black Sea. 



The evidence of philology supports in another way the Avestic 

 view of the primitive existence of the wasp. The Avesta does 

 not mention the honey bee, although that creature was common to 

 the people of Sanscrit at the beginning of their literature. Sphex, 

 vespa, wespe, guepe, wasp, are the same word known long before 

 Greeks, Romans, Germans, French and Angles parted to become 

 separate races. There is no common word for honey bee. It is 

 variously melitta, apis, abeille, bee, representing new ideas in each 

 land where it was named. Even the word for honey coincides 

 only in Greek, meli, and Latin, met. Honey was known, how- 

 ever, and inferentially the bee, before the Babel of tongues and 

 separation of races. Its first known use was to be mixed with 

 water, fermented and used as a drink. The Rig-Vedas are con- 

 ceded to be the oldest form of Sanscrit language. This work 

 mentions the honey-colored (or suffused) cloud, dropping its 

 pellucid rain. A Httle later it speaks directly: "the honey-seek- 

 ing bee praises thee, Indra (God of the favoring rain)." The 

 word for honey is niadhu. The word soon reappears in a meta- 

 phorical sense. The God of purification, Agni, from which is 

 thought to come the Latin ignis (fire, since purification comes 



* If the tribe of Derbices, meaning wasps, were to be considered by itself, 

 such an interpretation would be impossible. The Derlnces held their 

 ground and were mentioned by Pliny as a distinct tribe near the Jaxartes 

 River. Nevertheless, there is no impossibihty or even improbability that 

 the Greek idea of the wasps north of the Black Sea was based on the same 

 or allied tribe of Turanians. 



