Plutarch's Natural Questions (36-39)

Is it not because it is a creature that wonderfully delighteth in purity, cleanliness, and elegancy, and withal hath a marvellous quick sense of smelling? Because therefore such unclean dealings between man and woman are wont to leave behind much filthiness and impurity, the bees both sooner find them out and also conceive the greater hatred against them. Hereupon it is that in Theocritus the shepherd pleasantly sendeth Venus away unto Anchises to be well stung with bees for her adultery:

Now to mount Ida, to Anchises go,

Where mighty oaks and cypresses do grow;

Where hives and trees with honey sweet abound,

And both with humming noise of bees resound.

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Is it because depth is the mother of darkness, so that it doth dim and mar the sunbeams before they can descend so low as it? As for the uppermost superficies of the water, because it is immediately affected by the sun, it must needs receive the white brightness of the light; the which Empedocles verily approveth in these verses:

A river in the bottom seems

By shade of color black;

The like is seen in caves and holes,

By depth, where light they lack.