CHAPTER IX.

WAYS WORTHY OF CONSIDERATION.

IN the Koran, or Mussulman's Bible, Mohammed represents the Almighty as addressing the bee alone of all the creatures of His hand. The passage runs as follows: "The Lord spake by inspiration unto the bee, saying, 'Provide thee houses in the

mountains, in the trees, and

of those materials wherewith men build hives for thee; then eat of every kind of fruit, and walk in the beaten paths of thy Lord.'

There proceedeth from their bodies a liquor of various colours, wherein is a medicine for men.

herein is a sign unto people who consider."

Verily,

Mohammed was a false prophet, but, in spite of this, he was a great king, a mighty conqueror, and a very clever and learned man. He said very many wise things, and showed his great wit and discernment by culling the greater number from the Scriptures of Truth. From the Koran we learn that he

was a lover of Nature, and that he knew something of the ways of bees and the value of honey. His knowledge in this respect must have been greater than at first sight appears; for he speaks of bees building nests for themselves, quite different from the hive with which we are so familiar, and producing honeys of various colours. These things are not learned without a certain amount of inquiry and observation. Being only accustomed to the delicate pale yellow tint of the prolific stores collected by the English honey-bee, we may perhaps be apt to consider the allusion made to the various-coloured fluids issuing from the bee's body a mistake, or, probably, given to add beauty to the description; but no doubt Mohammed made his observations in the hot countries of which he was a native, and where honey of various shades of pink, green, and blood-red is often seen. In using these coloured fluids as food, however, it is wise to eat sparingly; for the tropical flowers secrete poisons which, although harmless to the bee when she drinks them in with the sweet juices in the flower-cup, are often very injurious to mankind. An army of soldiers has been known to be disabled for several days by indiscreetly partaking of these tropical kinds of honey, producing as they sometimes do a terrible drowsiness, severe vomiting, and a positive inability to remain in an erect position -symptoms often following a too free use of alcohol. Whether these results are due to the poisonous

elements is not quite clear, some people attributing the effects to the fact that honey in warm climates is apt to ferment, thus forming a strong intoxicant, very deleterious to the partaker.

Mead, the favourite drink of our Saxon ancestors, is made from honey mixed with water, and fermented. Good Queen Bess was extremely fond of this beverage, and to this day the recipe used in her household for the making of mead is preserved. It is to be hoped she did not indulge her appetite to excess, or her stately Majesty might have been rendered very undignified by its potent inebriating qualities. Pliny the Elder, who wrote a book describing the bee nearly 2,000 years ago, says that mead has all the bad, and none of the good, qualities of wine. From such a statement, made by such a man, we may conclude that we have lost nothing by discontinuing the manufacture of mead; at the same time, like a great many things which are not good for us, it is very delicious. Perhaps it is not quite correct to state that it is not now manufactured, for in the more southern counties of our little island it is yet made and drunk by the farm labourers and cottagers, who are therefore the late representatives in this particular of the most ancient and polished nations and of the barbarous tribes of North and South Europe, who alike quaffed this luscious cup.

From the quotation at the beginning of this

chapter, we learn that there are bees other than those living in hives and domesticated by man.

No one with the smallest power of observation could wander through the heather on a common, or bask in the fragrance and warmth of a clover-field in full bloom, without noticing the many insects, each bearing the essential characteristics of bees, yet differing in size and shape, that flit from flower to

been successfully domesticated, that one being the familiar honey-bee which exists in large communities governed by one queen.

All other kinds either lead solitary lives, or build nests in which several perfect females, or queens, live amicably together, jointly receiving the respect paid them by their subjects.

That great noisy bee, with its beautiful, striped, velvety body, is the humble-bee, probably getting

its name from its imposing hum. This species lives in nests, made sometimes in the ground, sometimes in the trunks of trees, which they carpet with leaves. and line with wax. These communities are not so great as those of the honey-bee, and they have several queens in the nest. Their comb is composed

of a mass of irregularly-clustered cells, in which they keep their stores of honey and bee-bread, and lay their eggs.