Part I The Honey-Makers I STRUCTURE, HABITS, AND PRODUCTS OF THE HONEY-BEE LITERATURE is filled with the Honey-makers and their incomparable gift, which appears now as ambrosia, now as nectar, and always as the synonym of sweetness unsurpassed. The Vedic poets sang of honey and the dawn at the same moment, and all the succeeding generations of India have chanted honey and its maker into their mythologies, their religions, and their loves. The philosophers of Greece esteemed the bee, and without honey and the bee the poets of Hellas would have lacked expressions of sweetness that all succeeding ages have seized upon as consummate. The Latin writers studied the bee not only for its usefulness as a honey-maker, but because of its unique character for industry, for its skill as a builder, and for its wonderful sagacity in its social organization. The writers of the middle ages were not only familiar with what had been said in the classics, but themselves knew the bee, its virtues, and its uses in literature. Modern writers are principally concerned with the structure and habits of the bee as revealed by modern science, and particularly with the part played by it as a fertilizer of the fruits and flowers. To fertilize the flowers has always been the office of the bee, as we can see now that the processes of nature are understood. But it cannot so easily be believed that the bee once gave the world the only "sugar it had, that is, the only material for sweetening; yet it is but a few centuries since sugar came into use in Europe. The first cane-sugar known in our records came from China, that wonderful secret country which has given us so many of our useful arts. Its course was thence to India and Arabia, and between China and these countries it appears to have been for centuries an article of trade. Alexander the Great, in that remarkable expedition which did so much to make the West acquainted with the East, is probably responsible for the first knowledge Europe had of sugar, for it is said that his admiral, Nearchus, on the return of his army to Greece B. C. 324, brought with him as a rare and delectable delicacy a quantity of sugar candy. The method of making "candy" appears to have been known and extensively practised in China from a very remote antiquity, and it was sent in large quantities to India. Thus we find candy, so frequently condemned as vain and frivolous, a most venerable and historical commodity, the forerunner of the tremendous sugar industry in the western world at the present time. Nearchus's candy was not the varied and delectable confection compounded by the artists of the present day, but probably a very simple sweet. Theophrastus, 320 B. C., calls sugar a sort of honey extracted from canes or reeds; and Dioscorides in the second |