The Honey-Makers

Half natural history, half literature: how the honey-bee actually works — tongue, wings, sting, swarm — and then three thousand years of what people have believed about her, from the Vedas to mead.

About the Book

1899Published
Margaret Warner MorleyAuthor
32Chapters
202Pages on this site

Margaret Warner Morley wrote The Honey-Makers (1899) in two parts. The first is anatomy and behaviour, observed closely: the bee's tongue, eyes and brain, the wings, the sting, the family, the swarm, honey and mead.

The second part is unlike any other bee book of its day: the bee in human imagination — Hindu literature, Egypt, Greece and Italy, folk beliefs and curious customs — a literary natural history to set beside the scientific one.

This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR, reconciled page by page, with Morley's own illustrations.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1899 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of The Honey-Makers (1899) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.