THE 
LORE OF THE -HONEY-BEE 
CHAPTER I 
THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 
“While great Cesar hurled War's lightnings by high 
Euphrates, ... even in that season J, Virgil, nurtured in 
sweet Parthenope, went in the ways of lowly Quiet.”— 
Fourth Book of the Georgics. : 
T was in Naples—the Parthenope of the 
Ancients—that the ‘best poem by the best 
poet” was written, nearly two thousand years 
ago. Essentially an apostle of the Simple Life, 
the cultured and courtly Virgil chose to live a 
quiet rural existence among his lemon-groves and 
his bee-hives, when he might have dwelt in the 
very focus of honour at the Roman capital; where 
his friend and patron, Mecenas, the prime minister 
of Octavian, kept open house for all the great in 
literature and art. 
Modern bee-keepers, athirst for the American- 
isation of everything, give little heed nowadays 
to the writings of one whom Bacon has called ‘“ the 
I 
