INTRODUCTION. 
‘' But these pursuits will honeyed fragrance bring 
Without the danger of a treacherous sting.” 
Bees suggest all that is beautiful, fragrant.and de- 
licious in the floral universe. Hence bee-keeping 
has been termed the “poetry of agriculture.” A 
flower without a bee to sip its nectar and rolic in its 
pollen, hints too broadly the quasi bliss of “single 
blessedness.” Types of toil, symbols of frugality, 
models of government—with Flora propitious, how 
extravagantly provident, and how cheerfully they 
fill our dish with a “ Benjamin’s mess” of their deli- 
cate fare. 
Whether bees are partial to good society, or man 
appreciates bees as he himself becomes refined— 
their temples have always marked the locum in quo 
of the highest style of human culture. Bees navi- 
gated the Nile in its palmiest days, to gather luscious 
wealth from her blooming fields. Phoenicia, precep- 
tor of the world, was graphically described to its 
‘“ heirs of promise,” as “a land flowing with milk and 
honey.” Greece, “the land of scholars,” had ber 
Mount Hybla—‘ the empire of bees’’—and Emelus 
cf Corinth, in 741 B. C., devoted a poem to their 
praise. Rome’s most elegant poet, Virgil, sang the 
bee in the noon of her splendor. The learned Ger- 
rians, importing the bee a Italy, and copying 
