Bugonia

A detailed description of the bugonia process can be found in Byzantine Geoponica:[1] Build a house, ten cubits high, with all the sides of equal dimensions, with one door, and four windows, one on each side; put an ox into it, thirty months old, very fat and fleshy; let a number of young men kill him by beating him violently with clubs, so as to mangle both flesh and bones, but taking care not to shed any blood; let all the orifices, mouth, eyes, nose etc.

be stopped up with clean and fine linen, impregnated with pitch; let a quantity of thyme be strewed under the reclining animal, and then let windows and doors be closed and covered with a thick coating of clay, to prevent the access of air or wind.

The first description, opening the second half of the fourth book, describes a 'traditional' form of the ritual, followed by the tale of Aristaeus, who after losing his bees, descends to the home of his mother, the nymph Cyrene, where he is given instructions on how to restore his colonies.

This second version served as the climax of a large work so may be based more on the traditional Roman sacrificial ritual than bugonia itself in order to close the Georgics in a more symbolically appropriate way.

Quoting Ovid's Metamorphoses (XV.361–68), Florentinus of the Geoponica reports the process as a proven and obvious fact:[1] If any further evidence is necessary to enhance the faith in things already proved, you may behold that carcases, decaying from the effect of time and tepid moisture, change into small animals.

Go, and bury slaughtered oxen -- the fact is known from experience -- the rotten entrails produce flower-sucking bees, who, like their parents, roam over pastures, bent upon work, and hopeful of the future.

A buried war-horse produces the hornet.Pre-dating Nicander by a century, Aristotle never mentions bugonia and dismisses generation of bees from other animals.

[24] In 1475, Konrad of Megenberg, in the first German book of natural history, cites Michel von Schottenlant and Virgil, claiming that the bees are born from the skin and the stomach of an ox.

[31][citation needed] Philo offers this origin of bees as a possible reason why honey is forbidden as a sacrifice to Yahweh.