[Footnote 208: Maeterlinck has made a charming picture of this habit of propinquity of the bee-stand to the human habitation. He describes (_La Vie des Abeilles_, 14) the old man who taught him to love bees when he was a boy in Flanders, an old man whose entire happiness "consistait aux beautés d'un jardin et parmi ces beautés la mieux aimee et la plus visitées etait un roucher, composé de douze cloches de paille qu'il avait peint, les unes de rose vif, les autres de jaune clair, la plupart d'un bleu tendre, car il avail observé, bien avant les experiences de Sir John Lubbock, que le bleu est la couleur preferée des abeilles. Il avait installé ce roucher centre le mur blanchi de la maison, dans l'angle que formait une des ces savoureuses et fraiches cuisines hollondaises aux dressoirs de faience ou étincalaient les etains et les cuivres qui, par la porte ouverte, se reflétaient dans un canal paisible. Et l'eau chargés d'images familières, sous un rideau de peupliers, guidait les regards jusqu'au répos d'un horizon de moulins et de prés."] [Footnote 209: Reading _Apiastro_. This is the _Melissa officinalis_ of Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny, XX, 45 and XXI, 86.] [Footnote 210: Bee keepers attribute to Reaumur the invention of the modern glass observation hive, which has made possible so much of our knowledge of the bee, but it may be noted that Pliny (_H.N._ XXI, 47) mentions hives of "lapis specularis," some sort of talc, contrived for the purpose of observing bees at work. The great advance in bee hives is, however, the sectional construction attributed to Langstroth and developed in America by Root.] [Footnote 211: Columella, (IX, 14) referring to the myth of the generation of bees in the carcase of an ox (out of which Virgil made the fable of the pastor Aristaeus in the Fourth Georgic), explains the practice mentioned in the text with the statement "hic enim quasi quadam cognatione generis maxime est apibus aptus." The plastering of wicker hives with ox dung persisted and is recommended in the seventeenth century editions of the _Maison Rustique_.] [Footnote 212: Reading _seditiosum_.] [Footnote 213: This is a mistake upon which Aristotle could have corrected Varro.] [Footnote 214: After studying the commentators on this obscure passage, I have elected to follow the emendation of Ursinus, which, although Keil sneers at its license, has the advantage of making sense.] [Footnote 215: _Sinapis arvensis_, Linn.] [Footnote 216: _Sium sisarum_, Linn.] [Footnote 217: The philosophy of the bee is not as selfish as that human principle which Varro attributes to them. The hive does not send forth its "youth" to found a colony, but, on the contrary, abandons its home and its accumulated store of wealth to its youth and itself ventures forth under the leadership of the old queen to face the uncertainties of the future, leaving only a small band of old bees to guard the hive and rear the young until the new queen shall have supplied a new population.]