WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 227 
he asks himself, can this be the same thing about 
which the old masters were led into such ardent 
eulogy? The truth is that when ancient and 
medizval writers spoke of honeydew, they used the 
word asageneral term for all that the bees gathered. 
Honey was all a dew, divinely rained down from 
the skies; and it is entirely of a piece with the 
universal lack of bee-knowledge down almost to the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, that no one 
should have guessed that the flowers themselves 
had anything to do with the matter. Virgil and 
the rest of the classics held absolute sway over all 
minds pretending to the least culture, and even 
the naturalists seem to have studied the wild life 
around them with no other object than to force 
facts into line with ancient poetic fantasies. The 
old writers explained the varying qualities of honey 
as being due to the influence of whatever stars 
happened to be in the ascendant at the time of 
its gathering, and the honey was good or bad 
according to whether this was favourable or un- 
favourable. 
The quality and consistency of honey varies 
extraordinarily as between the different sources 
of true nectar; but there is no doubt that honey- 
dew well merits the evil name it has gained with 
modern bee-keepers. There are, perhaps, three 
hundred distinct kinds of aphides known to Eng- 
lish naturalists, and all these eject the sweet liquid 
which, under certain conditions, bees are tempted 
15—2 
