CHAPTER III 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 



STUDENTS 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 litterati^ and 

 that it would be the rankest heresy to advance any 

 new truth, garnered from their individual experi- 



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