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.

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The Honey-Bee

LITERATURE is filled with the Honey-makers and their incomparable gift, which appears now as ambrosia, now as nectar, and always as the synonym of sweetness unsurpassed. The Vedic poets sang of honey and the dawn at the same moment, and all the succeeding generations of India have chanted honey and its maker into their mythologies, their religions, and their loves.

The philosophers of Greece esteemed the bee, and without honey and the bee the poets of Hellas would have lacked expressions of sweetness that all succeeding ages have seized upon as consummate.

The Latin writers studied the bee not only for its usefulness as a honey-maker, but because of its unique character for industry, for its skill as a builder, and for its wonderful sagacity in its social organization.

The writers of the middle ages were not only familiar with what had been said in the classics, but themselves knew the bee, its virtues, and its uses in literature. Modern writers are principally concerned with the structure and habits of the bee as revealed by modern science, IO and particularly with the part played by it as a fertilizer of the fruits and flowers.

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