ke Daphnis and fed on the
combs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoe cherishes
Adonis are "honey-cakes," and other tid-bits made of "sweet honey." In
the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when a
couple are married the attendants place honey in their mouths, by which
they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to their
souls as honey to the palate.

It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
distilled honey; and that once when Pindar lay asleep the bees dropped
honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the promised
Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about the
butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and
Jonathan's eyes were enlightened, by partaking of some wood or wild
honey: "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because
I tasted a little of this honey." So far as this part of his diet
was concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
wilderness, his divinity school-days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts, or, not
to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be said,
though they were among the creeping and leaping things the children
of Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten raw, but
roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground made hot
by building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been served
together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat with
honey. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in Palestine,
the prophet in eating them found his account in the general weal, and
in the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts, the more flowers.
Owing to its numerous wild-flowers and flowering shrubs, Palestine
has always been a famous country for bees. They deposit their honey in
hollow trees as our bees do when they escape from the hive, and in holes
in the rocks as ours do not. In a tropical or semi-tropical climate
bees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks, but where ice and snow
prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up in the trunk of a
forest tree.

The best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate zone.
There are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics. Honey from
certain districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting, and that
from Brazil is used