Home › The Honey-Bee › The Honey-Bee: Europe

The Honey-Bee: Europe

To fertilize the flowers has always been the office of the bee, as we can see now that the processes of nature are understood. But it cannot so easily be believed that the bee once gave the world the only "sugar it had, - that is, the only material for sweetening; yet it is but a few centuries since sugar came into use in Europe. " The first cane-sugar known in our records came from China, that wonderful secret country which has given us so many of our useful arts.

Its course was thence to India and Arabia, and between China and these countries it appears to have been for centuries an article of trade.

Alexander the Great, in that remarkable expedition which did so much to make the West acquainted with the East, is probably responsible for the first knowledge Europe had of sugar, for it is said that his admiral, Nearchus, on the return of his army to Greece B. c. 324, brought with him as a rare and delectable delicacy a quantity of sugar candy.

The method of making "candy" appears to have been known and extensively practised in China from a very remote antiquity, and it was sent in large quantities to India.

Thus we find candy, so frequently condemned as vain and frivolous, a most venerable and historical commodity, the forerunner of the tremendous sugar industry in the western world at the present time.

Nearchus's candy was not the varied and delectable confection compounded by the artists of the present day, but probably a very simple sweet.

Theophrastus, 320 B. C., calls sugar a sort of honey extracted from canes or reeds; and Dioscorides in the second Structure, Habits, and Products century informs us that a sort of concrete honey, called sugar, is found upon canes which grow in India and Arabia Felix.

This sugar, we are told, was in consistence like salt, being, like it, brittle between the teeth. "Sugar" came to be a synonym for everything that had a sweet taste, hence the acetate of lead is called "sugar of lead."

It was not until about the seventeenth century that sugar became an article of common use in Europe. Up to that time it was used chiefly as a medicine, or by the rich as a delicacy at feasts upon very special occasions.

At the present time sugar has superseded honey as an article of every-day use. Honey has lost most of its importance in the family life; but not so the bee, for we now know that it does inestimable service in perfecting the fruits of the earth, and that without it our orchards would be lean and our gardens barren.

This knowledge makes a scientific study of the bee as fascinating as is the story of honey and its maker in relation to the individual life of the races of men that have preceded us.

Since the bee existed before literature and history, the true sequence in treating it is, first, its structure and habits, and then its place in song and homily.

Its structure and habits were partly known and partly guessed by the ancients, who from Hesiod down wrote about it. Aristotle gives the best summary of Greek knowledge upon the subject, and from him succeeding authors down to near the present time drew their materials, amplifying the fables and absurdities, until the earliest English books upon the bee, although written in perfect seriousness, in the light of what we know to-day, read like humorous compositions.

The bee lends itself so readily to fun that at the present time it is treated as a joke almost as frequently as a sober subject for scientific research. In the present book the natural history of the bee is treated and the latest scientific results on the subject are given, yet, feeling that the general reader will enjoy the quaint and curious opinions of earlier generations, even as the present writer did, they too are set before him, not to discredit the gravity of so serious a subject, but rather as it were to warm the cold facts of science with a human glow and make them smile a little. Hence Aristotle and Pliny, Moffett and Butler, appear with their testimony concerning the structure of wings, tongue, or sting, alongside the modern scientists, instead of being kept strictly to their own side of the fence in the part entitled the Literature and History of the Bee.

In the second part of the book the bee is set up to be looked at in the light of mythology, the legend, poetry, history, and literature; and an astonishing insect it has proved to be under this examination. The writers of Indian literature have used it constantly, as have also the Greek and Latin writers from the earliest times to the later ones. Plato in philosophy and Plutarch in history have set it in their pages.

In mediæval times the church drew some of its most useful illustrations and lessons from the habits of the bee, and everywhere its wax has been used in magic and necromancy as well as in religious observances. The northern nations owe it a debt so great that we can scarcely see how they could have fought and sung without it; certainly they could not have mingled the draught that created the saga or brewed the mead that pledged the hero, without the cloying honey.

The poetry of the present is so rich in its use of the bee that it has been necessary to pass it almost without pausing, Structure, Habits, and Products I 3 so impossible is it to do justice to this subject in a book of reasonable length.

It has not been the object of the author to exhaust the subject of the bee in literature, — that would be a task, indeed, but rather to show the important place it holds in the principal literatures of the world, and to share with others the pleasure derived from pursuing the bee through these extensive and very delightful pastures.

It may not be out of place to say a word here concerning the bee's place in nature. It belongs to the branch of the animal kingdom known as Arthropoda, which contains more species than all the other branches taken together, and whose members are characterized by having the body composed of a series of more or less similar rings or segments joined together, some of the segments bearing jointed legs. To the Arthropoda belong the spiders, scorpions, centipedes, lobsters, and insects.

The insects again form the largest division of this branch, and they are distinguished as being air-breathing, with distinct head, thorax, and abdomen, possessing one pair of antennæ, three pairs of legs, and usually one or two pairs of wings in the adult state.

The insects form about four-fifths of the whole animal kingdom, and about a quarter of a million species have been described and named! And this enormous number is only a fraction, some say not more than one-tenth, of those actually existing.