Explore "The Georgics" by Virgil on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Virgil has taken care to raise the subject of each Georgic. In the first, he has only dead matter. In the second, he just steps on the world of life, and describes that of vegetables. In the third, he advances to animals: and in the last, singles out the bee, the most sagacious of them, for his subject.
In this Georgic, he shows us what station is most proper for the bees, and when they begin to gather honey; how to call them home when they swarm, and how to part them when they are engaged in battle. From hence he takes occasion to discover their different kinds; and, after an excursion, relates their prudent and politic administration of affairs, and the diseases that often rage in their hives, with the proper symptoms and remedies of each. In the last place he lays down a method of repairing their kind, supposing their whole breed lost; and gives the history of its invention.