The student of old books on apiculture is often surprised to read so much in praise of honeydew, while in the modern bee-garden he hears of it nothing but hearty condemnation. He is told that directly the bees begin to gather honeydew the store-racks must be removed from the hives, or the good honey will be ruined both in colour and flavour. He is shown some dark, ill-looking, watery stuff carefully sealed up by the bees, and is informed that it is nearly all honeydew. But, he asks himself, can this be the same thing about which the old masters were led into such ardent eulogy? The truth is that when ancient and mediæval writers spoke of honeydew, they used the word as a general term for all that the bees gathered. Honey was all a dew, divinely rained down from the skies; and it is entirely of a piece with the all but universal lack of bee-knowledge down almost to the beginning of the nineteenth century, that so few should have guessed that the flowers themselves had anything to do with the matter. Virgil and the rest of the classics held absolute sway over all minds pretending to the least culture, and even the naturalists seem to have studied the wild life around them with no other object than to force facts into line with ancient poetic fantasies. The old writers explained the varying qualities of honey as being due to the influence of whatever stars happened to be in the ascendant at the time of its gathering, and the honey was good or bad according to whether this was favourable or unfavourable. The quality and consistency of honey varies extraordinarily as between the different sources of true nectar; but there is no doubt that honeydew well merits the evil name it has gained with modern bee-keepers. There are, perhaps, three hundred distinct kinds of aphides known to English naturalists, and all these eject the sweet liquid which, under certain conditions, bees are tempted to gather. This honeydew varies in flavour according to the species of tree from whose sap it is derived. Probably much of it is only a sweet, slightly mawkish liquor, which, in its pure state, combines with the genuine honey without causing noticeable deterioration, at least to the unexpert taste and eye. But, unfortunately for bee-keepers, the oak is a great favourite with these parasites, no fewer than six varieties preying on this one tree alone. And oak-honeydew is a pestilent thing indeed.