80 
BRITISH BEES. 
fragrance, had delighted his sight and his smell long 
before he had been led by accident to discover that these 
industrious little workers collected into their treasury, 
from those same flowers, as exquisite a luxury for his 
taste, as they themselves had yielded to his other senses. 
Thus the earliest records speak of honey, and of bees, 
and of wax; and the land of promise to the restored 
Israelites, was to be a land flowing with milk and honey. 
Reaumur, whose observations upon bees had been pur¬ 
sued with such patient and indefatigable perseverance, 
combined with such minute accuracy, and then recorded 
so agreeably, and who conceived the possibility of esta¬ 
blishing a standard of length, for the common use of 
all nations, to be derived from the length of a certain 
number of the honey-cells of the comb, to which notion 
he was doubtless led by their mathematical precision and 
uniform exactitude, appears to have been unaware of the 
existence of other species of the genus, and hence he 
assumed, in his ignorance of this fact, that in all coun¬ 
tries they were alike. 
Travellers had, even for more than a century before, 
mentioned different kinds of honey, derived from different 
kinds of bees, which, however, Reaumur does not, from 
this circtimstance, seem to have known. Had he been 
acquainted with it, his philosophical accuracy of observa¬ 
tion and habit of reflection would certainly have assumed 
the possibility of differences of size in the cells of the dif¬ 
ferent bees, and he would have waited until opportunity 
had given him the power of determining whether this 
mode of admeasurement could be safely adopted as cer¬ 
tainly being of universal prevalence. It is to be won¬ 
dered at also, that he did not weigh the possibility that 
climatic differences in the distribution of even the Apis 
