6 AUSTRALASIAN 
In the earliest history of the Russian people, in the ninth 
and tenth centuries, we find mentioned among the chief articles 
of their trade, “the spoils of their bee-hives and the hides of 
their cattle,” and “their native commodities of furs, wax, and 
hydromel ;’ and a Greek historian, describing the state of 
Britain at the time of the visit of the Greek Emperor Manuel 
(about 1400), says: “The land is overspread with towns and 
villages ; though destitute of vines, and not abounding in 
fruit trees, it is fertile in wheat and barley, in honey and 
wool.” 
The true history of the rise and progress of the art of bee- 
keeping amongst the Greeks and Romans, and its extension 
over Europe during the middle ages, is as yet unwritten, but 
there can be no doubt that amongst the Northern nations the 
use of honey became with time more and more a matter of 
necessity, much of their fermented liquors being prepared 
from it, and the more northern the positions, and the more 
severe the winter seasons, the more essential it became to 
domesticate the bees, or use artificial means for preserving 
them during the winter months. 
The primitive system of bee-keeping adopted in the earliest 
period of Greek civilisation seems to have been followed with 
little change or improvement by the Romans and the nations 
which rose upon the ruins of that empire, and to have been 
handed down from father to son almost unaltered until the 
close of the last century. In the first half of the present 
century some important improvements were introduced into 
England, especially by Thomas Nutt, a self-instructed apiarist, 
who was one of the first to condemn and abolish the barbarous 
custom of destroying the bees with sulphur, and to invent and 
practice a more rational and humane method of taking the 
surplus honey in separate boxes and bell-glasses. Since the 
middle of the seventeenth century much attention had been 
paid to the natural history of the bee and other insects by 
Von Swammerdam in Holland, Maraldi in Italy, Réaumur, 
Lepeletier and Latreille in France, Bonnet in Switzerland 
Linneus in Sweden, and by Dr. John Hunter and Dr. Bevan 
in England; but it is to the researches and discoveries of 
Huber and Dzierzon that we are indebted for that knowledge 
of the physiology of the honey-bee which has led to those great 
practical improvements which may be said to constitute the 
