The Bear and the Bees

L'Estrange's version is slightly more condensed even than his: "A Bear was so enrag'd once at the Stinging of a Bee, that he ran like mad into the Bee-Garden, and over-turn'd all the Hives in revenge.

"[4] Just as Abstemius had seen the moral merit of the Mediaeval symbol of the bear and the bees, so the compilers of Renaissance Emblem books were to follow him in using it to point to the consequences of giving way to anger.

[7] Robert Dodsley tells his version of a bear taking revenge for a single sting and coming to the painful conclusion of how much better it would have been "to have patiently acquiesced in one injury, than thus by an unprofitable resentment to have provoked a thousand".

The illustration there of "The Bear and the Honey-bees" by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder was eventually used for a trencher in England with a translation of the moral about the rim: "The bees do feircely sting the Beare/ While he their hony Hives do tear/ So some that Pleasure seek in Haste/ With sower Sawce their Sweet do taste.

When it appeared in George Wither's A collection of emblems: ancient and modern (1635), he was reusing the German plates of Gabriel Rollenhagen from twenty years earlier.

Device 23 pictures the bear scrambling up a tree, his head surrounded by angry bees, and has the title Patior Ut Potiar (suffering for success).

[18] The Catholic writer William Henry Anderdon followed him in The Christian Æsop: ancient fables teaching eternal truths (1871), seeing in the episode a lesson in the need for confession as the accompaniment of penitent sorrow.

In the case of Jan van Kessel the Elder, the other three scenes included "The Wolf, the Deer and the Sheep", "The Lion and the Boar" and "The Sick Stag".

Since the fable was short and featured only a single episode, it did not furnish much scope for illustrators who, for the most part, confined themselves to depicting a bear crouching by an overturned skep and trying to protect its muzzle and eyes from the encircling bees.

Such illustrations lent themselves to use in ornamenting domestic items, such as the wooden fireplace in Somerset House, Halifax, West Yorkshire, from about 1760[23] or the design on a 1770 Royal Worcester painted plate.