WHER^ THE BEE SUCKS 227 



he asks himself, can this be the same thing about 

 which the old masters were led into such ardent 

 eulogy ? The truth is that when ancient and 

 mediaeval writers spoke of honeydew, they used the 

 word asageneral term for all that the bees gathered. 

 Honey was all a dew, divinely rained down from 

 the skies ; and it is entirely of a piece with the all 

 but universal lack of bee-knowledge down almost 

 to the beginning of the nineteenth century, that so 

 few should have guessed that the flowers them- 

 selves had anything to do with the matter. Virgil 

 and the rest of the classics held absolute sway over 

 all minds pretending to the least culture, and even 

 the naturalists seem to have studied the wild life 

 around them with no other object than to force 

 facts into line with ancient poetic fantasies. The 

 old writers explained the varying qualities of honey 

 as being due to the influence of whatever stars 

 happened to be in the ascendant at the time of 

 its gathering, and the honey was good or bad 

 according to whether this was favourable or un- 

 favourable. 



The quality and consistency of honey varies 

 extraordinarily as between the different sources 

 of true nectar ; but there is no doubt that honey- 

 dew well merits the evil name it has gained with 

 modern bee-keepers. There are, perhaps, three 

 hundred distinct kinds of aphides known to Eng- 

 lish naturalists, and all these eject the sweet liquid 

 which, under certain conditions, bees are tempted 

 IS— 2 



