There is no need to say very much about the Fourth and last of the Georgics, which treats exclusively of bees. These little creatures were evidently of more importance in the rural economy of the Romans than they commonly are in ours. Before the discovery of the sugar-cane, the sweetening properties of honey would be much more valuable than they are now; and the inhabitants of a warm climate like Italy make more use of saccharine matter, as an article of ordinary food, than we do. But the habits and natural history of the insect commonwealth to which Virgil devotes this book are so curious and so little understood, that they would only find an appropriate place in a special treatise. There appears to have been no want of interest or research upon the subject among the ancients, for the Greek philosopher Aristomachus is said to have devoted fifty-eight years to this single branch of zoology. Virgil certainly would not help us much in a scientific point of view. The bees were mysteries to him, even more than to us; and, marvellous as they are, he made them more marvellous still. He was quite aware that they had some peculiarities in the matter of sex; but he makes the queen bee, who is really the mother of the swarm, a king, and imagines that they pick up their young ones from the leaves and flowers. He gives also--and with an air of as much practical reality as can be expected from a poet--minute instructions for obtaining a stock of bees at once from the carcass of a steer, beaten and crushed into a mass, and excluded from air: evidently a misapplication of what is said to be a fact in natural history, that bees will take up their quarters occasionally in the dead body of an animal. The honey he considers to be some kind of dew that falls from heaven. One rule which he gives for preventing the young swarms from rising at undue times has staggered some inexperienced commentators. He advises the owner to pick out the queen bees, and clip their wings. Such a recipe certainly suggests at first sight the old preliminary caution--“First _catch_ your bee:” but an experienced bee-keeper will find no difficulty in performing such an operation, if needful.[10] The fine episode with which this book concludes, in which the poet relates the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, is more attractive than all his discourse upon bee-keeping.