CHAPTER III 
BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 
TUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee 
are generally struck with two very remark- 
able characteristics about them—their invari- 
able fine old classic and romantic flavour, and their 
ingenious leavening of a great mass of quite 
obvious fable by a very small modicum of enduring 
fact. 
It is difficult to realise, until one has delved 
deep into these curious old records, how com- 
pletely they are dyed through and through with 
the picturesque, but mainly erroneous, ideas of the 
-ancient classic bee-fathers. The writers were, 
almost without exception, earnest, practical men, 
whose chief interest in life was the study and 
pursuit of their craft. But they seem, one and all, 
to have laboured under the idea that it was their 
bounden duty to uphold everything written about 
bees by the old Greek and Roman “i#eratz, and 
that it would be the rankest heresy to advance any 
new truth, garnered from their individual experi- 
28 
