Shakespeare and Bees

Of course, there's this piece from the Tempest:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
 Merrily, merrily shall I live now
 Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

 -- William Shakespeare

This morning I found this in a Gordon Reader digitized by Google:


The Gordon Readers  By Emma K. Gordon,  Marietta Stockard

Clearly Shakespeare thought, as did most people of his time,
that the bees had a king rather than a queen.

In a New Zealand journal article from 1948, the writer mentions
that Shakespeare very frequently had an entymological bent.

This was a moment of fun distraction while I spend my Saturday
cleaning out my basement!