Chap. 12.] 
QUALITIES OE HONEY. 
11 
^Qumerous is sure to be the progeny of the swarm. When the 
honey is beginning to come to maturity, the bees drive away 
the drones, and setting upon each in great numbers, put them 
all to death. It is only in the spring that the drones are 
ever to be seen. If you deprive a drone of its wings, and then 
replace it in the hive, it will pull off the wings of the other 
drones. 
CHAP. 12. THE QUALITIES OF HOIS^EY. 
In the lower part of the hive they construct for their future 
sovereign a palatial abode, spacious and grand, separated from 
the rest, and surmounted by a sort of dome : if this promi- 
nence should happen to be flattened, all hopes of progeny are 
lost. All the cells are hexagonal, each foot^^ having formed 
its own side. ^^"0 part of this work, however, is done at any 
stated time, as the bees seize every opportunity for the perform- 
ance of their task when the days are fine ; in one or two 
days, at most, they fill their cells with honey. 
(12.) This substance is engendered from the air,^- mostly at 
the rising of the constellations, and more especially when 
Sirius is shining ; never, however, before the rising of the 
Yergilise. and then just before day-break. Hence it is, that at 
early dawn the leaves of the trees are found covered with a 
kind of honey-like dew, and those who go into the open air at 
an early hour in the morning, find their clothes covered, and 
their hair matted, with a sort of unctuous liquid. Whether 
it is that this liquid is the sweat of the heavens, or whether 
a saliva emanating from the stars, or a juice exuding from the 
air while purifying itself, would that it had been, when it 
comes to us, pure, limpid, and genuine, as it was, when first 
it took its downward descent. But as it is, falling from so 
vast a height, attracting corruption in its passage, and tainted 
by the exhalations of the earth as it meets them, sucked, too, 
as it is from off the trees and the herbage of the fields, and 
accumulated in the stomachs of the bees — for they cast it up 
2^ Cuvier says that the cell for the future queen is different frora the 
others, and much larger. The bees also supply the queen larva much more 
abundantly with food, and of more delicate quality. 
Cuvier says that this coincidence with the number of the legs is quite 
accidental, as it is with the mouth that the animal constructs the cell. 
The basis of it is really derived from the calix or corolla of flowers. 
