80 BRITISH BEES. 



fragrance, had delighted his sight and his smell long 

 before he had been led by accident to discover that these 

 industrious little workers collected into their treasury, 

 from those same flowers, as exquisite a luxury for his 

 taste, as they themselves had yielded to his other senses. 

 Thus the earliest records speak of honey, and of bees, 

 and of wax; and the land of promise to the restored 

 Israelites, was to be a land flowing with milk and honey. 

 Reaumur, whose observations upon bees had been pur- 

 sued with such patient and indefatigable perseverance, 

 combined with such minute accuracy, and then recorded 

 so agreeably, and who conceived the possibility of esta- 

 blishing a standard of length, for the common use of 

 all nations, to be derived from the length of a certain 

 number of the honey-cells of the comb, to which notion 

 he was doubtless led by their mathematical precision and 

 uniform exactitude, appears to have been unaware of the 

 existence of other species of the genus, and hence he 

 assumed, in his ignorance of this fact, that in all coun- 

 tries they were alike. 



Travellers had, even for more than a century before- 

 mentioned different kinds of honey, derived from different 

 kinds of bees, which, however, Reaumur does not, from 

 this circumstance, seem to have known. Had he been 

 acquainted with it, his philosophical accuracy of observa- 

 tion and habit of reflection would certainly have assumed 

 the possibility of differences of size in the cells of the dif- 

 ferent bees, and he would have waited until opportunity 

 had given him the power of determining whether this 

 mode of admeasurement could be safely adopted as cer- 

 tainly being of universal prevalence. It is to be won- 

 dered at also, that he did not weigh the possibility that 

 climatic differences in the distribution of even the Apis 



