46 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
One last extract must be given from the same 
old writer. It relates to the generation of bees, 
and brings us out, perhaps, on the highest pin- 
nacle of the marvellous. After a learned disserta- 
tion on the method of breeding bees from a dead 
ox—assuring us, however, that if we can procure 
a dead lion for the purpose, it will be much better, 
as then the bees will have a lion-like courage— 
the writer goes on to explain how bees may be 
produced in another way. We are to save all 
dead bees, burn them, sprinkle the ashes with wine, 
and then leave them exposed to the sun in a warm 
place. In a little while, we are told, all the bees 
so treated will come to life again, and we shall 
then have a new stock ready for hiving. 
Dipping into these time-worn records of the 
Middle Ages, with their embrowned, scarce legible 
type and their antiquated phraseology, one comes 
at last to realise how very little the old bee-masters 
actually understood of the true ways of the honey- 
bee, or, indeed, of any real essential in bee-craft. 
And yet the production of honey and wax must 
have been an industry very largely developed in 
those days. Somehow or other, in spite of archaic 
theories and useless interference in the work of 
their hives, these people must have contrived to 
supply a market of whose magnitude we can now- 
adays form little conception. The trade in wax 
alone must have been a very large one, for, except 
in the poorest tenements, this formed the only 
