The Greeks believed that bees came from dead oxen and could be raised
by killing an ox and leaving it in a sealed room for thirty-two days.
This story persisted for hundreds of years; directions for producing
bees this way were last published as late as 1842.

Until 1609, when an English beekeeper observed a queen laying eggs,
queens were believed to be "kings" who ruled over their hives; Virgil
wrote that bees collected their young from leaves and sweet plants;
Xenophon called the queen the housewife of her hive, its guiding
brain.

The Dutchman Swammerdam thought that queens were fertilized by an
"odoriferous effluvia" produced like an exhalation of perfume from
drones. The Roman scholar Varo wrote that diarrhea in bees could be
cured by giving them urine to drink and that bees gathered wax from
flowers. Piny the Elder wrote that bees could be slain by echoes. It
was widely believed that the sound of clashing cymbals caused bees to
swarm.

News bees: in Appalachian folklore, "news bees" appeared as omens to
those wise enough to read them: there were yellow news bees, which
meant that good things were in the offing, and black news bees which
warned of imminent death. The black news bees would fly in the
windows and out again, and fly straight for the nearest cemetery;
they would hover making a sound like a human being talking.

But what are we to make of Gerard, the English herbalist, writing
that he had with his own eyes seen young geese hatched out of the
barnacles on driftwood? Or Andrew Crosse achieving the spontaneous
generation of insects during a chemical experiment?

;-)

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