From the Historical Honeybee Articles site.
Floriferis ut apes In saltibus omnla libant

Second Special Notice, titled:
The Bee.

Huron Reflector
Tuesday, May 02, 1843 Norwalk, Ohio

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From the National Intelligencer. 

The Bee.

“The Honey Bee: Its Natural History, Physiology,
and Management, by Edward Bevan,
with thirty-five engravings on wood," 8vo. pp.
128. Philadelphia, Carey & Hart.

A subject always interesting, and an
excellent book upon it. It is the good
fortune of this noble, this wise, this singular
little insect, to have attracted the
studies of many men of genius and to
have been celebrated by their pens;—
which have, indeed, often been employed
upon it with a peculiar delight. Favorites
themselves of the Muses, their
younger brothers, the poets, have loved
them from the earliest times, and told
how, along with a certain she-goat called
Amalthea, they were the nurses of
the infant Jove, who cherished them ever
after, and bestowed upon them that
admirable skill in government which
they have practiced ever since.

The Bee is, at any event, not a little
the companion of civilized man. On
this continent it marches with him, the
pilot, the forerunner of his regular taking
possession. When it first lent itself
to human service we do not learn.—
It seems certain, however, that it was
known to use in very early times, since
all those who describe the Golden Age
agree in saying that honey gushed out
of all the oak trees, and that every brook
flowed with milk, (none of your sky-blue
composition, skimmed first and profusely
watered afterwards, as we get it
in towns,) ready to eat with it. The
heathen gods themselves, in those good
old days, are supposed to have fed upon
a better sort of it, culled probably from
the immortal flowers of Elysium; for
the famous ambrosia, on which they regaled
themselves, is averred to have
been like honey, only nine times sweeter;
and their nectar was clearly only a
superior kind of metheglin, of which the
Olympian butler, Mr. Ganymede, jealously
kept the recipe from all human eyes.

Other Greek traditions attest the early
domestication of the Bee, which that
race probably brought with them from
their Caucasian cradle, along that
Scythian and Thracian route by which
they came into Hellas. Virgil —a very
learned authority in such remote matters
attributes to Aristteus, the contemporary
and the rival of Orpheus, the
first taming and rearing of these little
winged philosophers —a history which
forms that beautiful episode in the Georgics 
Pliny, however, (as well as we
recollect,) contends that the Bee was
first introduced into Greece from Egypt
by the colony which Cecrops led into
Attica. That tale of Cecrops and his
colony, however, we must beg Mr. Pliny
to consider, is entirely passed over
by Homer; so that it is evidently of
posterior invention, and utterly improbable,
in as much as the Egyptians were
no sailors and inculcated a religious horror
of the sea -a point in which every
man of sense must still agree with them.
But to proceed: the Bee was certainly
well known to the Hebrews before they
quitted the valley of the Nile, since the
spies whom they send forward to explore
the Promised Land return and
report that it was "a land flowing with
milk and honey." It would be talking
like a commentator were we now to go
on and argue ponderously, from this
fuel, that they must have held that diet
in habitual affection.

A little lower down in Sacred History,
one finds Samson constructing a riddle
upon the occasion of his having
swarmed a colony of Bees in a very singular
hive -the carcass of a lion which
he had slain. 

Later still, they must have abounded
even in the desert parts of Palestine,
since St. John the Baptist subsisted on
them and locusts.

To return however, to Hybla and
Hymettus. The latter might well be
the native scat of our insect, since it still
flourishes there, surviving the poets who
celebrated it there of old, the philosophers
about whose lips it sometimes
clustered, and every thing but the beauty
of the skies and the blandness of the
air. So at least Byron tells us when
speaking of Attica:
“Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;
Sweet are thy groves and verdant are thy fields,
Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled,
And still his honied wealth Hymcttus yields.
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The free born wanderer of thy mountain air:
Apollo still thy lone, long summer gilds,
Still in his beams Mcndeli's marbles glare-
Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair!”

(All which, our readers Will see, is
very pretty; though we could easily
show, had we time, that his lordship did
not come by it very honestly.) But to
proceed:

The Greeks, indeed, not only venerated
Bees for their political skill -the
image which the hive offers of a perfectly-
ordered commonwealth -but for their
taste in eloquence and poetry.  Their
clustering about the cradles of Plato,
Pindar, Menander, and some Others was
held to be a certain presage of harmonious
prose or verse. The Greek, styled
Bees, therefor, "the birds of the Muses."
So, too, Milton seems to regard them,
when he invokes the sound of their
wings as one of the influences which the
poet courts when he hides himself in
some deep shade for the airy visits of
imaginative dreams: 

“There, in close covert, by a brook
Where no profaner eye may look,
Hide me from day's garish eye,
While the bee, with honied thigh,
That at her flowery work doth sing,
And the waters murmuring
With, such concert as they keep
Entice the dewy-feathered sleep.” 

In the wilder mythological inventions
of the Scandinavians, which have the fancy,
but not the grace, the taste, the singular
elegance of the Greek fables, the
Bee figures as affording, in mead or yet
more potent metheglin, the refreshment
with which their heroes and even their
gods solaced themselves in that half-
Mahomedan paradise, where they fed
upon the perpetual flesh of a boar killed
every day and reproduced on the morrow;
washing it down with copious
draughts of a richer hydromel, supplied
(singularly enough) from the teats of the
celestial goat Heidruna. It is thus that
Gray talks, in his Gaelic and Runie
translations, of

“Nectar which the bees produce,
Or the grape's ecstatic juice.”

The latter potation is certainly added
by the poets fancy, or from the necessities
of the rhyme: for neither the Cambrians
nor Scandinavians could have
known such a liquor, except by report,
their climate absolutely refusing it to
them, and granting them no compensation
but the drinks distilled from honey,
or that saddest of all possible liquids, the
horror of the Muses and Bacchus, beer,
the most anti-poetical of all fluids, of
which when one drinks, he gets duller
just in proportion as he grows tipsier -a
foul, thick, and oblivious drunkenness,
the sottishness of which no single ray of
exhilaration lights up.

Mead, then, being the favorite beverage
of the earlier Northern nations, the
Bee was, of course, greatly an object of
their care. Drinks prepared from honey
thus remained one of the main household
refections even down to the time of
Queen Elizabeth; who appears, from a
recipe that still preserves her name, to
have prided herself on a particular skill
in their preparation.

With their favorite insect, it befel naturally
enough that our ancestors associated
those glad aerial creatures of their
superstitions, the Fairies; whose sworn
brothers and playmates they made the
Bees to be, among the flower-cups
which both frequented alike. Thus 
Ariel sings, in "the Tempest:”

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.”

So, too, in the "Midsummer Night's
Dream," the transformed Bottom, when
tended by Titanin and her tiny crew of
elves, desires the most valiant of them,
Monsieur Cobweb, to get his tools of
war, slay him a humble-bee, and bring
him its pouch of honey: but, considerate
of his stature, cautions him not to
break the honey-bag, lest it half drown
him.

Bottom. “Where's Pease-blossom?”
Pense blossom. “Ready.”
Bottom. “Scratch my head,  Pense-blossom. 
Where's Monsieur Cobweb?”
Cobweb. “Ready.”
Bottom. “Monsieur Cobweb! Good Monsieur,
get your weapons in hand, and kill me a red
hipp'd humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and,
good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do
not fret yourself too much in the action, Monsieur;
and good Monsieur, have a care the honey
bag break not: I would be loth to have you
overflown with a honey-bag, good Signor.”

The Bee is so perfectly the poetry
and romance of all natural history, that
one's fancy, upon such a subject, runs
riot in all sorts of excursions. There
are not wanting, however, much graver
things to say of it; for their art of government
presents, beyond question, a
model of polity, such as human ingenuity
has in vain striven to equal, and, perhaps, 
fails the more to equal, because it
wanders too far from the wisdom of nature,
is too ingenious, and sets up resorts
too nice and complex; instead of the
wise and easy simplicity of plain practice
and things, giving us words, doctrine,
and all that, which pay us off with
sounds, instead of a healthy and right
government. The Bees, in a word, are
not at all addicted to abstractions.

With them each State is the image of
every other: first, perhaps, because they
discovered that every race of insects, at
least, if not of men, is happiest under
that form of government to which the
habits of the race have generally tended;
and, secondly, because their occupations
and the condition of their society being
very where alike, they perceive that
this identity should be reflected in their
laws. For good laws and good government
they know are not the attempted
embodiment of universal truths, including
every sort of circumstances and
communities the most different, but laws
modestly confining themselves to your
own exact situation and necessities, and
less to what you ought to be than to
what you are.

In point of form their governments
may be said to be regal; but it is a royalty
of affection and respect, not force-
without an army, without courtiers,
without slaves, with not a guard except
that which the love of the whole people
forms about the sovereign. It is, in a
word, but a despotism as to the enforcement
of the public good, to winch alone
the thoughts of all orders are directed.
In short, it is a perfect republic, under
the guise of the government of one person,
the head of the state, but in no sort
its master. No rule can lie more paternal,
or, rather, maternal; for, as is well
known, the Bees are so far from having
a Salique law, that none but a female
can be their monarch.

Thus far, briefly, of the Bees as politicians.
But in truth we have written
on, as yet, in humble imitation of what
is now the approved mode of reviewing
-that is to say, without ever touching
the book ostensibly reviewed.  At another
time we will proceed after an
older fashion, and give an exact account
of our author, and whatever in his subject
seems to us fittest to be presented to
our readers.

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You can read Bevans 1827 1st Edition Here

The honey bee; its natural history, physiology, and management - 1827
By Edward Bevan
http://www.archive.org/details/honeybeeitsnatur00bevarich


Best Wishes,
Joe Waggle
Historical Honeybee Articles
Floriferis ut apes In saltibus omnla libant
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/HistoricalHoneybeeArticles/

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