It must be borne in mind that, strictly speaking, the honey-bee does not, and never did, possess a sting. What is commonly known as her sting is really an ovipositor, and it is as such that it is almost exclusively used by the modern queen-bee in every hive to-day. But when the first hordes of worker-bees were brought into the world, reduced by the science of starvation to little more than sexless sinews and brains, they seemed to have conceived a terrible revenge on their ancestors. The useless ovipositor was turned into a weapon of offence, against which the drone’s magnificent panoply of sound and fury availed him nothing. Matriarchy was established at the point of the living sword. A pitiless logic overran everything. Intolerance of all the bright asides of life—the wine, the dance, the merry talk, and genial tarryings by the path, beloved of all drones, bee or human—darkened the day. And the result is only more honey, a vaster storehouse filled to the brim with never-to-be-tasted sweets, at a cost unfathomable, when the old larder would have sufficed for every real need, and life might still have been merry and leisurely. It is only a fable, far-fetched, fantastic, as any told to the Caliph in the “Arabian Nights.” But there, again, the woman had her way, like the bee-woman before, and some day she and her kind may get it on a more ambitious scale. And then—what of the sword that was once a sewing-needle? “Some are content with saying that they do it by Instinct, and let it drop there; but I believe God has given us something farther to do, than to invent names for things, and then let them drop.”—A. I. ROOT. CHAPTER I THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE “While great Cæsar hurled War’s lightnings by high Euphrates, . . . even in that season I, Virgil, nurtured in sweet Parthenope, went in the ways of lowly Quiet.”—_Fourth Book of the Georgics_. IT was in Naples—the Parthenope of the Ancients—that the “best poem by the best poet” was written, nearly two thousand years ago. Essentially an apostle of the Simple Life, the cultured and courtly Virgil chose to live a quiet rural existence among his lemon-groves and his bee-hives, when he might have dwelt in the very focus of honour at the Roman capital; where his friend and patron, Mæcenas, the prime minister of Octavian, kept open house for all the great in literature and art. Modern bee-keepers, athirst for the Americanisation of everything, give little heed nowadays to the writings of one whom Bacon has called “the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known.” And yet, if the question were asked, What book should first be placed in the hands of the beginner in apiculture to-day? no wiser choice than this fourth book of the Georgics could be made.