4 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
and labour, that the work took seven years to 
accomplish—which is at the rateof less than a line 
a day. 
Virgil’s house stood, probably, on the wooded 
slope above the town of Naples, deep set in orange- 
groves and lemon-plantations, and in full view, to 
the north, of the snow-pinnacled Apennines, and, 
southward, of the bluewaters of the Bay. Vesuvius, 
too, with its eternal menace of grey smoke, rose 
dark against the morning sun only a few leagues 
onward; and, at its foot, the doomed cities 
nestled, Pompeii and Herculaneum, then with 
still a hundred years of busy life to run. 
Bee-hives in Virgil’s day—as we can gather from 
certain ancient Roman bas-reliefs still in existence 
—were of a high, peaked, dome pattern, and they 
were made of stitched bark, or wattled osiers, as 
he himself tells us. Many of the directions he 
gives as to their situation and surroundings are 
-still golden rules for every bee-keeper. The bee- 
garden, he says, must be sheltered from winds, 
and placed where neither sheep nor butting kids 
may trample down the flowers. Trees must be 
near for their cool shade, and to serve as resting- 
places when “the new-crowned kings lead out 
their earliest swarms in the sweet spring-time.” 
He tells us to place our hives near to water, or 
where a light rivulet speeds through the grass ; 
and we are to cast into the water “large pebbles 
and willow-branches laid cross-wise, that the bees, 
