SWAMMERDAM 193 



what Swammerdam has to say about these things had 

 been known for ages to beemasters. 



Aristotle, Virgil and Pliny tell how bees in windy 

 weather load themselves with small pebbles, to save 

 themselves from being blown away, and Swammerdam 

 tries to show how this belief may have originated.^ 

 When he was living in France in 1666 he observed the 

 habits of the mason-bee (Chalicodoma), and saw it carry- 

 ing small pebbles for the strengthening of its stony 

 nest. 



He tries to make intelligible the tale of Sampson and 

 the swarm of bees which made combs in the carcase of a 

 dead lion.^ Perhaps the bones of the lion had first been 

 cleaned by maggots. But he adds the significant fact 

 that there are flies so like bees, and with maggots so like 

 bee-larvae that they may easily be taken for true bees. 

 In our own time Osten Sacken has more fully worked 

 out this notion of Swammerdam's, and put it beyond 

 doubt that the resemblance of drone-flies to bees is the 

 basis of the ancient and wide-spread belief that bees may 

 be generated from putrefying carcases. 



Whatever poets and philosophers may have imagined, 

 Swammerdam holds that all the acts of the workers in 

 the hive are governed by necessity ; they have no real 

 government, no virtues, no rewards nor punishments. 

 Elsewhere he says that the bees learn their duties from 

 nature, not by copying others. 



There is a short but useful account of humble-bees 

 and their nests, which was afterwards greatly expanded 

 and improved upon by Reaumur. 



Swammerdam is far from methodical in his statement 

 of facts, and the reader is sometimes put to much 

 trouble by his habit of modifying in one place what 



^Biblia Naturce, p. 525. ' B.N., p. 527. 



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