e made by a careful and experienced bee-keeper in a good
situation, from a given sum invested in an Apiary, than from the same
money invested in any other branch of rural economy, I am equally
certain that there is none in which a careless or inexperienced person
would be more sure to find his outlay result in an almost entire loss.
An Apiary neglected or mismanaged, is far worse than a farm overgrown
with weeds, or exhausted by ignorant tillage: for the land is still
there, and may, by prudent management, soon be made again to blossom
like the rose; but the bees, when once destroyed, can never be brought
back to life, unless the poetic fables of the Mantuan Bard, can be
accepted as the legitimate results of actual experience, and swarms of
bees, instead of clouds of filthy flies, can once more be obtained from
the carcases of decaying animals! I have seen an old medical work in
which Virgil's method of obtaining colonies of bees from the putrid body
of a cow slain for this special purpose, is not only credited, but
minutely described.

A large book would hardly suffice to set forth all the superstitions
connected with bees. I will refer to one which is very common and which
has often made a deep impression upon many minds. When any member of a
family dies, the bees are believed to be aware of what has happened, and
the hives are by some dressed in mourning, to pacify their sorrowing
occupants! Some persons imagine that if this is not done, the bees will
never afterwards prosper, while others assert, that the bees often take
their loss so much to heart, as to alight upon the coffin whenever it is
exposed! An intelligent clergyman on reading the sheets of this work,
stated to me that he had always refused to credit this latter fact,
until present at a funeral where the bees gathered in such large numbers
upon the coffin, as soon as it was brought out from the house, as to
excite considerable alarm. Some years after this occurrence, being
engaged in varnishing a table, and finding that the bees came and lit
upon it, he was convinced that the love of varnish, (see p. 85,) instead
of sorrow or respect for the dead, was the occasion of their gathering
round the coffin! How many superstitions in which often intelligent
persons most firmly confide, might if all the facts were known, be as
easily explained.

Before closing this Chapter, I must again strongly caution all
inexperienced bee-keepers, against attempting to transfer