Instincts and Habits of Bees. 101 



a metaphor or comparison, it has the vitality of observation in 

 it; he had learnt wisdom from the hives of Warwickshire as 

 the Indian Cuma discovered how to send his love-shafts to the 

 lieart by stringing his bow with singing bees. I like to com- 

 pare Shakespeare's ntterances with facts, where snch compa- 

 risons are possible, and his bee lore will always endure the 

 test and prove him master of the hive as well as of the heart. 

 What is there of descriptive poetry to equal the brilliant sum- 

 mary of the social economy of the hive which occurs in 

 4C Henry Y." (Act i. s. 2), where it only needs to substitute 

 iC Queen " for " King/' to render the description strictly scien- 

 tific? In other passages there are the most distinctive evidences 

 of Shakespeare's minuteness of observation, which only those 

 familiar with bees know how to value fairly. In the second 

 part of " King Henry VI." (Act. iii. s. 2), Warwick describes — 



" The commons, like an angry hive of bees 

 That want their leader, scatter up and down, 

 And care not who they sting in his revenge." 



A faithful picture of an enraged colony of bees such as I have 

 seen and attempted to describe,* not thinking at the time how 

 it had been done already by one stroke of the pen by the 

 master-mind of the world. 



Among the instincts and habits of bees there is scarcely 

 anything so noticeable as the extent to which they are in- 

 fluenced by the varying conditions of temperature, the hygro- 

 metric condition of the atmosphere, and the phases indicated 

 by the barometer. Virgil must have noticed this frequently, 

 how a bright warm day at any season brings them out in 

 myriads, how rain depresses them, and even a passing cloud 

 will sometimes terrify them, so that in a few minutes there 

 will be a general rush homewards, though perhaps there is not 

 the smallest probability of a fall of rain. Do you remember 

 the lines in the fourth Greorgic, beginning, " At liquid! 

 fontes" (ver. 18 — 24), where — 



— cum prima novi ducent examina reges 

 Vere suo, ludetque favis emissa juventus ; 



gives a most picturesque idea of the awakening of the hive at 

 the opening of the summer, when flowers abound and the 

 young bees rush forth in the spring of their life to mingle in 

 the vast concerns that make the business of the hive complete. 

 The first simile on this head is taken from the life of the 

 honey-bee, and Virgil, Tasso, and Milton have sucessively 

 imitated the passage. The only method of testing the value 

 of such passages is to bring them to the hive, and then, what 



* Vide " Apis, a Tragedy," Cottage Gardener, vol. svii. p. 243. 



