Roman Farm Management Part 27

[Footnote 200: This is one of Varro's puns which requires a surgical operation to get it into one's head. Appius is selected to talk about bees because his name has some echo of the sound of _apis_, the word for bee.]

[Footnote 201: The study of bees was as interesting to the ancients as it is to us. There have survived from among many others the treatises of Aristotle, Varro, Virgil, Columella and Pliny, but they are all made up, as Maeterlinck has remarked, of "erreurs charmantes," and for that reason the antique lore of bees is read perhaps to best advantage in the mellifluous verses of the fourth _Georgic_, which follow Varro closely.]

[Footnote 202: He might have said also that the hexagonal form of construction employed by bees produces the largest possible result with the least labour and material. Maeterlinck rehea.r.s.es (_La Vie des Abeilles_, 138) the result of the study of this problem in the highest mathematics:

"Reaumur avait propose au celebre mathematicien Koenig le problem suivant: 'Entre toutes les cellules hexagonales a fond pyramidal compose de trois rhombes semblables et egaux, determiner celle qui peut etre construite avec le moins de matiere?' Koenig trouva qu'une telle cellule avait son fond fait de trois rhombes dont chaque grand angle etait de 109 degres, 26 minutes et chaque pet.i.t de 70 degres, 34 minutes. Or, un autre savant, Maraldi, ayant mesure aussi exactement que possible les angles des rhombes construits par les abeilles fixa les grands a 109 degres, 28 minutes, et les pet.i.ts a 70 degres, 32 minutes. Il n'y avait done, entre les deux solutions qu'une difference de 2 minutes. II est probable que l'erreur, s'il y en a une, doit etre imputee a Maraldi plutot qu'aux abeilles, car aucun instrument ne permet de mesurer avec une precision infallible les angles des cellules qui ne sont pas a.s.sez nettlement definis."

Maclaurin, a Scotch physicist, checked Koenig's computations and reported to the Royal Society in London in 1743 that he found a solution in exact accord with Maraldi's measurements, thereby completely justifying the mathematics of the bee architect.]

[Footnote 203: The Romans were as curious and as constant in the use of perfumes as we are of tobacco. It is perhaps well to remember that they might find our smoke as offensive as we would their unguents.]

[Footnote 204: Indeed one of the marvels of nature is the service which certain bees perform for certain plants in transferring their fertilizing pollen which has no other means of transportation. Darwin is most interesting on this subject.]

[Footnote 205: The ancients, even Aristotle, did not know that the queen bee is the common mother of the hive. They called her the king, and it remained for Swammerdam in the seventeenth century to determine with the microscope this important fact. From that discovery has developed our modern knowledge of the bee; that the drones are the males and are suffered by the (normally) sterile workers to live only until one of them has performed his office of fertilizing once for all the new queen in that nuptial flight, so dramatically fatal to the successful swain, which Maeterlinck has described with wonderful rhetoric, whereupon the workers ma.s.sacre the surviving males without mercy. This is the "driving out" which Varro mentions.]

[Footnote 206: This picture of the queen bee is hardly in accord with modern observations. It seems that while the queen is treated with the utmost respect, she is rather a royal prisoner than a ruler, and, after her nuptial flight, is confined to her function of laying eggs incessantly unless she may be unwillingly dragged forth to lead a swarm. Maeterlinck thus pictures (_La Vie des Abeilles_, 174) her existence with a Gallic pencil:

"Elle n'aura aucune des habitudes, aucunes des pa.s.sions que nous croyons inherentes a l'abeille. Elle n'eprouvera ni le desir du soleil, ni le besoin de l'es.p.a.ce et mourra sans avoir visite une fleur. Elle pa.s.sera son existence dans l'ombre et l'agitation de la foule a la recherche infatigable de berceaux a peupler. En revanche, elle connaitra seule l'inquietude de l'amour."]

[Footnote 207: It would have interested Axius to know that the annual consumption of honey in the United States today is from 100 to 125 million pounds and that the crop has a money value of at least ten million dollars. To match Seius, we might put forward a bee farmer in California who produces annually 150,000 pounds of honey from 2,000 hives.]

[Footnote 208: Maeterlinck has made a charming picture of this habit of propinquity of the bee-stand to the human habitation. He describes (_La Vie des Abeilles_, 14) the old man who taught him to love bees when he was a boy in Flanders, an old man whose entire happiness "consistait aux beautes d'un jardin et parmi ces beautes la mieux aimee et la plus visitees etait un roucher, compose de douze cloches de paille qu'il avait peint, les unes de rose vif, les autres de jaune clair, la plupart d'un bleu tendre, car il avail observe, bien avant les experiences de Sir John Lubbock, que le bleu est la couleur preferee des abeilles. Il avait installe ce roucher centre le mur blanchi de la maison, dans l'angle que formait une des ces savoureuses et fraiches cuisines hollondaises aux dressoirs de faience ou etincalaient les etains et les cuivres qui, par la porte ouverte, se refletaient dans un ca.n.a.l paisible. Et l'eau charges d'images familieres, sous un rideau de peupliers, guidait les regards jusqu'au repos d'un horizon de moulins et de pres."]

[Footnote 209: Reading _Apiastro_. This is the _Melissa officinalis_ of Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny, XX, 45 and XXI, 86.]

[Footnote 210: Bee keepers attribute to Reaumur the invention of the modern gla.s.s observation hive, which has made possible so much of our knowledge of the bee, but it may be noted that Pliny (_H.N._ XXI, 47) mentions hives of "lapis specularis," some sort of talc, contrived for the purpose of observing bees at work. The great advance in bee hives is, however, the sectional construction attributed to Langstroth and developed in America by Root.]

[Footnote 211: Columella, (IX, 14) referring to the myth of the generation of bees in the carcase of an ox (out of which Virgil made the fable of the pastor Aristaeus in the Fourth Georgic), explains the practice mentioned in the text with the statement "hic enim quasi quadam cognatione generis maxime est apibus aptus." The plastering of wicker hives with ox dung persisted and is recommended in the seventeenth century editions of the _Maison Rustique_.]

[Footnote 212: Reading _seditiosum_.]

[Footnote 213: This is a mistake upon which Aristotle could have corrected Varro.]

[Footnote 214: After studying the commentators on this obscure pa.s.sage, I have elected to follow the emendation of Ursinus, which, although Keil sneers at its license, has the advantage of making sense.]

[Footnote 215: _Sinapis arvensis_, Linn.]

[Footnote 216: _Sium sisarum_, Linn.]

[Footnote 217: The philosophy of the bee is not as selfish as that human principle which Varro attributes to them. The hive does not send forth its "youth" to found a colony, but, on the contrary, abandons its home and its acc.u.mulated store of wealth to its youth and itself ventures forth under the leaders.h.i.+p of the old queen to face the uncertainties of the future, leaving only a small band of old bees to guard the hive and rear the young until the new queen shall have supplied a new population.]

[Footnote 218: Reading _imbecilliores_.]

[Footnote 219: Pliny (_H.N_. IX, 81) relates that this loan was made to supply the banquet on the occasion of one of the triumphs of Caesar the dictator, but Pliny puts the loan at six thousand fishes.]

[Footnote 220: It is impossible to translate this pun into English, _dulcis_ being the equivalent of both "fresh" and "agreeable," and _amara_ of "salt" and "disagreeable." A French translator would have at his command _doux_ and _amer_.]

[Footnote 221: Cf. Pliny (_H.N_. II, 96): "In Lydia the islands called Calaminae are not only driven about by the wind, but may even be pushed at pleasure from place to place, by which means many people saved themselves in the Mithridatic war. There are some small islands in the Nymphaeus called the Dancers, because, when choruses are sung, they move in tune with the measure of the music."]

[Footnote 222: Reading _in ius vocare_, with the _double entendre_ of service in a sauce and bringing to justice.]