ne or
stucco to prevent their escape. Young nut trees should be planted in
the enclosure, and when these are not bearing, mast and chestnuts
should be thrown in to the dormice, for that is what makes them
fat. Roomy cages should be provided for them in which to rear their
young.[198] Little water is necessary, for dormice do not require much
water, but on the contrary affect dry places. They are fattened in
jars which are usually kept indoors. The potters make these jars in
different shapes, but with paths for the dormice to use contrived on
the sides and a hollow to hold their food, which consists of mast,
walnuts and chestnuts.[199] Covers are placed on the jars and there in
the dark the dormice are fattened."

_Of bees_

XVI. "It remains now," said Appius, "to rehearse the third and last
act of our drama of the husbandry of the steading and to discuss the
keeping of fishes."

"The third, indeed," exclaimed Axius, "shall we deprive ourselves of
honey because in your youth you never drank mead in your own house,
such was your practice of frugality?"

"He speaks the truth," said Appius, to us, "for I was indeed left a
poor orphan with two brothers and two sisters to provide for, and it
was not until I had married one of them to Lucullus without portion
and he had named me his heir that I began to drink mead in my own
house and to supply it to my household: but there never was a day when
I did not offer it to all my guests. But apart from that, it has been
my fortune, not yours,[200] Axius, to have known these winged creatures
whom nature has endowed so richly with industry and art, and that you
may appreciate that I know more than you do of their almost incredible
natural art, listen to what I am to say. It will then be for Merula
to develop the practice of the bee keeper, or, as the Greeks call it,
[Greek: melittourgia], as methodically as he has his other subjects.

"To begin then,[201] bees are generated partly by other bees and partly
from the decaying carcase of an ox: so Archelaus in one of his
epigrams calls them

'flitting offspring of decaying beef,'

and else where he says,

'wasps spring from horses, bees from calves.'

"Bees are not of a solitary habit like eagles, but are of a social
nature, like men, a characteristic they share with daws, but not for
the same reason, for bees live in colonies, the better to work and
build, while daws congregate for gossip. Thus the life of a bee is one
of