22 
In another place Varro (Ll. c. IL, 16, 4) quotes two passages 
from the old poet Archelaus. In an epigram Archelaus calls 
the bees (in Greek) 
»actitious children of a rotten ox“ 
which Bochart translates: ,Corruptae bovis factitiam prolem.“ 
The other passage says: 
»Lhe horse produces the wasp, the young bullock, bees.“ 
The often-quoted passage in Pliny (XI, 20) says: ,dead 
bees preserved under cover during winter, and then dried in 
the vernal sun and covered with cinders of a fig-tree, can be 
restored to life. When they are hopelessly lost, they can be 
obtained again by covering the paunch of an ox with dung, or, 
as Virgil says, from the dead body of a young bullock. In the 
same way hornets and wasps can be obtained from dead horses, 
and beetles from dead asses; so does nature change one thing 
into another (mutante natura ex aliis quaedam in alia).“ This 
is the passage in which, to the astonishment of Aldrovandi 
(p. 58), Pliny quotes Virgil, and‘not Aristotle (comp. below 
p. 26). In this passage, as well as in the second one of Arche- 
laus, quoted above, we find the hornet and wasp connected 
with the horse, a connection which I believe to have succeeded 
in explaining on p. 15 and in the Supplement V. 
Ovid has two passages, one in the ,Metamorphoses* the 
other in the ,Fasti*. The first I have already reproduced 
on p. 6. 
The other passage relates how Aristaeus, having put the 
sleeping Proteus in fetters, compels him to reveal the art of 
producing bees. Proteus answers: 
incomprehensible: ,,et hunc Plautium locutum esse latine quam Hirrium praetorem 
renuntiatum Romam in senatu scriptum habemus. sed bono animo es, non minus 
satisfaciam tibi, quam qui Bugoniam scripsit.“ I follow the edition of H. Keil, 
Leipzig 1889. The lexicographer K. KE. Georges must have had another text in 
view when, sub voce’Bugonia he quotes this very passage and adds: Titel einer 
Schrift von Archelaus. 
