Borlase, in his Antiquities of Cornwall, p. 168, tells us of another strange practice in the hiving of Bees. He says: “The Cornish, to this day, invoke the spirit of Browny, when their Bees swarm; and they think that their crying Browny, Browny, will prevent them from returning into the former hive, and make them pitch and form a new colony.”[655] The Rev. Thomas P. Hunt, of Wyoming, Pa., has devised an amusing plan, by which he says he can, at all times, prevent a swarm of Bees from leaving his premises. Before his stocks swarm, he collects a number of dead Bees, and, stringing them with a needle and thread, as worms are strung for catching eels, makes of them a ball about the size of an egg, leaving a few strands loose. By carrying--fastened to a pole--this “_Bee-bob_” about his Apiary, when the Bees are swarming, or by placing it in some central position, he invariably secures every swarm.[656] The barbarous practice of killing Bees for their honey, not yet entirely abolished, did not exist in the time of Aristotle, Varro, Columella, and Pliny. The old cultivators took only what their Bees could spare, killing no stocks except such as were feeble or diseased. The following epitaph, taken from a German work, might well be placed over every pit of these brimstoned insects: HERE RESTS, CUT OFF FROM USEFUL LABOR, A COLONY OF INDUSTRIOUS BEES, BASELY MURDERED BY ITS UNGRATEFUL AND IGNORANT OWNER. To the epitaph also may be appended Thomson’s verses: Ah, see, where robbed and murdered in that pit, Lies the still heaving hive! at evening snatched, Beneath the cloud of guilt-concealing night, And fixed o’er sulphur! while, not dreaming ill, The happy people, in their waxen cells, Sat tending public cares. Sudden, the dark, oppressive steam ascends, And, used to milder scents, the tender race, By thousands, tumble from their honied dome Into a gulf of blue sulphureous flame![657]