67 
Soranus lived about 100 B. C., while Hippocrates died about 350 
B. C. After that, it was superfluous to relate a similar case of 
bees in a funeral vault in Verona (1566), which Polus also bor- 
rows from Bochart. 
With Studer begins a better understanding of the story. He 
is of the opinion that, if we admit in Samson’s story the influence 
of a popular creative tradition, we may also allow that, in 
the imagination of the story-teller, the bees were actually gene- 
rated from the rotting carcase of the lion! This assumption 
seems the more plausible, as it agrees exactly with the word- 
ing of the riddle: ,And out of the strong came forth sweet- 
ness*, and, as it tallies with the requirement of a riddle, that 
its solution should be possible in so far as it is dependent on 
some notion familiar to both parties. It should be some natural 
phenomenon believed to be possible, and which the people con- 
cerned were expected to guess from the obscure wording of 
the riddle. With this train of thought, Studer connects the re- 
ferences of Bochart with the remarks of Jaxos to the passage 
in Aelian II, 57 of Barker, Ep. Critic. p. 228, and of DsEnr- 
KinDUS in Horreo, Hannover 1822. 
About the last of these papers, which I am not acquainted 
with, Studer says that its object is to inquire into the source 
of such a superstition, and it is the very object of the present 
lines to point out this source. The superstition owes its origin 
to the confusion of the honey-bee with a carcase-fly, Mristalis 
tenax, which is so like the bee, and especially the stingless 
drone, that non-entomologists do not easily distinguish them (1). 
The larvae of Hristalis tenax develop in water, charged with 
putrescent organic matter, and accumulated in drains, around 
dunghills, or cartases. If we do not see them about carcases 
often at present, it is because sanitary police regulations have 
(1) All the persons to whom I showed the specimens of FH. tena at once 
recognized bees in them, except a medical man, who had some knowledge of 
entomology. A stingless bee in Abyssinia, mentioned in Ludolf, Hist. aethiop. I, 
13, 25 may possibly be an 1, tenaw (Merx). 
