Seite - 1085 - in The Complete Aristotle

Swarms are robbed of their honey on the appearance of the wild fig. They produce the best larvae at the time the honey is a-making. The bee carries wax and bees’ bread round its legs, but vomits the honey into the cell. After depositing its young, it broods over it like a bird. The grub when it is small lies slantwise in the comb, but by and by rises up straight by an effort of its own and takes food, and holds on so tightly to the honeycomb as actually to cling to it. The young of bees and of drones is white, and from the young come the grubs; and the grubs grow into bees and drones. The egg of the king bee is reddish in colour, and its substance is about as consistent as thick honey; and from the first it is about as big as the bee that is produced from it. From the young of the king bee there is no intermediate stage, it is said, of the grub, but the bee comes at once. Whenever the bee lays an egg in the comb there is always a drop of honey set against it. The larva of the bee gets feet and wings as soon as the cell has been stopped up with wax, and when it arrives at its completed form it breaks its membrane and flies away. It ejects excrement in the grub state, but not afterwards; that is, not until it has got out of the encasing membrane, as we have already described. If you remove the heads from off the larvae before the coming of the wings, the bees will eat them up; and if you nip off the wings from a drone and let it go, the bees will spontaneously bite off the wings from off all the remaining drones. The bee lives for six years as a rule, as an exception for seven years. If a swarm lasts for nine years, or ten, great credit is considered due to its management. In Pontus are found bees exceedingly white in colour, and these bees produce their honey twice a month. (The bees in Themiscyra, on the banks of the river Thermodon, build honeycombs in the ground and in hives, and these honeycombs are furnished with very little wax but with honey of great consistency; and the honeycomb, by the way, is smooth and level.) But this is not always the case with these bees, but only in the winter season; for in Pontus the ivy is abundant, and it flowers at this time of the year, and it is from the ivy-flower that they derive their honey. A white and very consistent honey is brought down from the upper country to Amisus, which is deposited by bees on trees without the employment of honeycombs: and this kind of honey is produced in other districts in Pontus. There are bees also that construct triple honeycombs in the ground; and these honeycombs supply honey but never contain grubs. But the honeycombs in these places are not all of this sort, nor do all the bees construct them. 1085