STARTING AN APIARY. 303 



same money invested in any other branch of rural economy, 

 I am equally certain that there is none in which a careless 

 or inexperienced person would be more sure to find his out- 

 lay result in an almost entire loss. An Apiary neglected 

 or mismanaged, is far worse than a farm overgrown with 

 weeds, or exhausted by ignorant tillage : for the land is still 

 there, and may, by prudent management, soon be made 

 again to blossom like the rose ; but the bees, when once 

 destroyed, can never be brought back to life, unless the 

 poetic fables of the Mantuan Bard, can be accepted as the 

 legitimate results of actual experience, and swarms of bees, 

 instead of clouds of filthy flies, can once more be obtained 

 from the carcases of decaying animals ! I have seen an old 

 medical work in which Virgil's method of obtaining colonies 

 of bees from the putrid body of a cow slain for this special 

 purpose, is not only credited, but minutely described. 



A large book would hardly suffice to set forth all the 

 superstitions connected with bees. I will refer to one 

 which is very common and which has often made a deep 

 impression upon many minds. When any member of a 

 family dies, the bees are believed to be aware of what has 

 happened, and the hives are by some dressed in mourning, 

 to pacify their sorrowing occupants ! Some persons imag- 

 ine that if this is not done, the bees will never afterwards 

 prosper, while others assert, that the bees often take their 

 loss so much to heart, as to alight upon the coffin whenever 

 it is exposed ! An intelligent clergyman on reading the 

 sheets of this work,, stated to me that he had always refused 

 to credit this latter fact, until present at a funeral where 

 the bees gathered in such large numbers upon the coffin, as 

 soon as it was brought out from the house, as to excite 

 considerable alarm. Some years after this occurrence, 

 being engaged in varnishing a table, and finding that the 



