“4 AUSTRALASIAN 
haunts of the wild bees, when found, had to be pillaged with 
the aid of smoke or sulphur fumes, and that the operation 
was not always an agreeable one we may conclude from the 
way in which bees are mentioned in the few passages of 
Scripture where they are incidentally alluded to, as in Deut. 
i. 44, where Moses, recapitulating all that had happened to the 
Israelites during their migration, tells them, “The Amorites 
came out against you and chased you as bees do.” And in 
Psalm exviii. 13, “They (the heathens) encompassed me about 
like bees.” 
Amongst the Western nations the civilised Greeks had un- 
questionably practised the art of bee-keeping at a very early 
period. The laws of Solon, 600 years B.C., contain regulations 
as to the distances apart at which bee-hives may be kept ; and 
both Greeks and Romans wrote ana sang about bees and bee- 
keeping from the times of Homer down to those of Aristotle, 
Virgil, Palladius, Pliny, and Columella. It is very probable 
that the Romans first introduced the practice into Palestine. 
The term “wild” honey is never met with in the ancient 
Scriptures, simply because all honey deserved that name in 
those times; but the Evangelists Matthew and Mark, who 
wrote when Palestine had been for nearly a century virtually 
a Roman Province, both use the term ‘locusts and wild honey.” 
We may conclude that at that time the people were accustomed 
to keep bees in artificial hives, and they would naturally make 
a distinction between honey so obtained and that gathered by 
“‘ wild ” bees in the “ wildernesses”” or unfrequented places. 
When Alexander carried his conquests into India, in the 
fourth century B.c., he found honey so plentiful there that he 
imposed a tribute payable in honey and wax. The Romans, 
at a much later period, levied a tribute of 200,000 lbs. of wax 
yearly upon Corsica, and the countries of the “ barbarians ” 
outside the limits of the Roman Empire in Europe were known 
to produce (and certainly without any art of bee-keeping) 
large quantities of both honey and wax. In the early part of 
the third century, when the Goths were gradually migrating 
towards the Roman Provinces, Gibbon ‘mentions that. when 
they took possession of the present Russian district of the 
Ukraine,* ‘The plenty of game ‘and fish, the innumerable bee- 
* This is the part of Russia from which the largest quantiti 
obtained at the present day. Sard ies of honey are 
