There is, of course, a great deal of difference between a chance discovery of a wild-bee’s nest, as a common and expected incident in a day’s foraging, and the systematic preservation and tending of beehives as a source of daily food. While it is reasonable to assume that the first men used honey as an article of diet, it is probable that they were a wandering race, never halting for long in the same locality, and therefore unlikely to be bee-keepers in the accepted sense of the word. They depended, no doubt, on the wild honey-stores which they happened to find in their entourage for the time being. But the first sign of civilisation must have been the gradual lessening of this nomadic instinct. Tribes would come to take permanent possession of districts rich in the game, as well as the fruits and tubers, necessary for their daily food. At the same time the haunts of the wild bees would be discovered, their enemies kept down or driven away, the places where the swarms pitched annually noted, and thus the first apiary would have been founded, probably long before any attempt at cultivation of the soil or domestication of the wild creatures for food was made. Biologists generally regard hunting as the oldest human enterprise under the sun; but, adopting their well-known method of deductive reasoning, it seems possible to make out a rather better case for beemanship in this category. The primæval huntsman must have found much difficulty in bringing down his game, and still more in securing it, when maimed, but yet capable of eluding final capture. For this purpose some sort of retrieving animal, fleeter of foot and more cunning than its master, must have been even more necessary in primæval times than it is in the modern days of the gun. There seems to be no evidence of man indicating the most elementary civilisation without sure signs also that he had trained and used some sort of dog to help him in his daily food-forays. But man must have existed long before civilisation can be said to have come within age-long distance of him. In these times, beset with enemies, he must have built his hut nest-like in some high, impregnable tree, out of reach of night-prowling foes; and it is scarcely conceivable that the dog was his companion under these conditions. More probably he lived, for the most part, on fruits and honey-comb, and such of the small creatures as he could capture with his naked hands. Thus, in all likelihood, the first hunter was a bee-hunter. Eolithic man may have had his own rocky fastness or clump of hollow trees, where the wild bees congregated; and with the coming of each summer he may have followed his swarms through the glades of primæval forests as zealously as any bee-keeper of the present day.