Bees were held to be bred out of putrefying carcases, an idea that doubtless arose in very early times, as we find it referred to by Virgil and other ancient authors, and the Biblical story of the swarm of bees found by Sampson in the carcase of the lion that he slew would be held as confirmation, though anyone reading the story[128] carefully would see that no such inference could be drawn from it. Many weeks had elapsed between the slaying of the lion and the discovery of the honey, ample time for the birds and beasts of prey to have cleared away the flesh, and for the heat of the sun to have dried up all putrefaction and rendered the skeleton a sufficiently cleanly and suitable place for the wild bees to form their combs within. Herodotus tells us that when the Amathusians revenged themselves on Onesilus, by whom they had been besieged, by cutting off his head and hanging it over one of their city gates, the skull presently alone remained, and in this hollow chamber a swarm of bees settled and filled it with honeycomb. The fourth Georgic of Virgil, which is devoted to the subject of bees, gives account of a simple method whereby the race of bees, if diminished or lost, might be replenished. He speaks of it as an art practised in Egypt, and it is easy to see that it originated in accounts of bees swarming in the dead bodies of animals. The process was to kill a young bullock by stopping up his nostrils, so that the skin should be unbroken by any wound, and then leaving it for nine days in a position where it would be undisturbed, when:— “Behold a prodigy, for from within The broken bowels and the bloated skin, A buzzing sound of bees the ear alarms: Straight issuing through the sides assembling swarms. Dark as a cloud they make a wheeling flight, Then on a neighbouring tree descending, light. Like a large cluster of black grapes they show, And make a large dependence from the bough.”[129] In this account we see clearly enough that the belief in the generation of the bees from the putrefying body is frankly accepted. The author of the “Speculum Mundi,” hundreds of years after the Georgics were written, declares that a dead horse breeds wasps, that from the body of an ass proceed humble bees, while a mule produces hornets. Those who would have bees must seek them in a dead calf, though he adds the curious limitation, “if the west winde blow.” He goes on to say “whether the bees in Samson’s dead lion were bred anywhere else no man knoweth.” As an Englishman, more familiar with the possibilities of a dead calf than with those of a dead lion, he declines to commit himself to an opinion as to what is or is not possible in far distant lands over sea.[130]