As the goat relishes the taste of the poisonous water-hemlock, so our soft-billed birds will also feed on poisonous berries. We have not heard of any bad consequences to those who eat goat's flesh, nor to the Italian amateurs of beca-ficos, though the latter have been partly fattened on the deleterious berries of the laurel or the nightshade; but in Ame-rica, birds eaten after they have fed on the fruit of the kalmia are reported to have produced fatal consequences *. The flowers of the latter plant also, and several others ranked as virulent poisons, are frequently robbed of their honey by bees, whose taste does not seem to intimate the existence of any deleterious quality, no more than does the taste of people who afterwards partake of such honey to their cost. It is not mentioned, indeed, that this honey, so fatal to man, is at all injurious to the bees by which it is collected; though Dr. Darwin tells us, that the bees are well aware of the sorts of honey which would injure themselves, and will not therefore touch it t.

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Perhaps," says the elder Huber, "the sense of taste is the least perfect of those enjoyed by bees; for, contrary to the received opinion, they display little choice in collecting honey; nor do they testify greater nicety in the quality of their water, for the most corrupted marshes and ditches seem to be preferred to the most limpid streams, nay, even to dew itself. Nothing, therefore, is more unequal than the quality of honey, the produce of one district differing from another, and the honey of spring being unlike that of autumn; while even the contents of one hive do not always resemble those of the one which is contiguous. But though bees are thus not

*See Dr. Schumacher's Cases in Anderson's Journ. iii. 456. + Temple of Nature.

very choice in their nutriment, and are by no means delicate in regard to the quality of honey, they are far from being indifferent with regard to quantity. They soon discover, and consequently frequent the places where most is to be found, and they quit their hive much less in regard to the fineness or temperature of the weather, than according to their prospects of a plentiful or a scanty collection. When the limetree and black-thorn blossom, they brave the rain, departing before sun-rise, and returning later than ordinary; but this activity soon relaxes: when the flowers begin to fade, and when the scythe has cut down the fields of clover, the bees are seldom tempted to go from their home by the most brilliant sunshine*"

With respect to poisonous honey, the earliest notice of it we have met with is given by Xenophon, who tells us that, during the memorable retreat of the ten thousand Greeks from Persia, the soldiers, on coming to a place near Trebizonde, where there was a great number of bee-hives, sucked some of the combs, and in consequence became intoxicated, and were seized with a virulent cholera morbus †. Tournefort, the celebrated French botanist, when in the vicinity of Trebizonde, was anxious to ascertain the facts mentioned by Xenophon, and obtained good reason to be satisfied with his inquiries. He concluded that the poisonous honey is collected from a flowering shrub, abundant in that neighbourhood, the very odour of whose blossoms, smelling like honey-suckle, produce intoxicating effects. It is not very clear, from his description, whether it is the roselaurel (Rhododendron ponticum) or the yellow

*Huber on Bees, page 258.
Memorabilia.

Voyage du Levant; 4to, Paris, 1717.

Rose-laurel (Rhododendron ponticum).

azalea (Azalea pontica), both of which are poisonous and indigenous in Asia Minor. Father Lamberti also found the same plants and poisonous honey in Mingrelia*.

During the autumn and winter of 1790, the honey collected near Philadelphia was found to be so fatally deleterious to those who partook of it, that it attracted the attention of the American Government, and a minute inquiry was ordered to be instituted. The result was, that the poisonous honey was traced to the flowers of the Kalmia latifolia. Dr. Barton

*Mission to Mingrelia, in Thevenot's Collection.

enumerates several other species of Kalmia, Azalea, Rhododendron, and Andromeda, which produce poisonous honey that proves injurious to dogs, as was ascertained by experiment. Upon man it produces vertigo, dimness of sight, delirium, ebriety, pain in the stomach and bowels, convulsions, profuse perspiration, foaming at the mouth, vomiting, purging, and sometimes temporary palsy of the limbs, though it seldom proves fatal *. Recently, however, two persons at New York are said to have lost their lives by eating wild honey, supposed to have been collected *Barton, in Amer. Phil. Trans.

from the flowers of the dwarf laurel, which abounds in the American woods*.

"It may seem," says Mouffet, "to be not so much to Dame Nature's honour, that she should bring forth a thing so desired of all men, as honey is, and so ordinarily to temper it with poyson. Nay, but in so doing she did not amiss, so to permit it to be; that she might thereby make men more cautious and lesse greedy, and to excite them not only to use that which should be wholesome, but to seek out for antidotes against the unwholesomeness of it: and for that cause she hath hedged the rose about with prickles, given bees a sting, hath infected the sage with toadspittle, and mixed poyson (and that very deadly too) with honey, sugar, and manna."

66 enu

The remarks of Dr. Evans, upon the probability of our British honey being poisoned, are worthy of attention. "As most of the plants," he says, merated as producing poisonous honey, are now introduced into our gardens, and the thorn apple (Datura stramonium) has long become perfectly naturalized, they might be supposed to injure the British honey. Most probably, however, their proportion to the whole flowers in bloom is too small to produce any such inconvenience; whereas, on their native continent, they exclusively cover whole tracts of country, as in the Jerseys +."

That vegetable poisons are sometimes fatal to bees themselves, however, appears from the following notice: A large swarm of bees having settled on a branch of the poison ash (Rhus vernix), in the county of West Chester, in America, was taken into a hive of fir, at three o'clock in the afternoon, and removed to the place where it was to remain, at nine. About five the next morning the bees were found dead, *Bevan on Bees, p. 68.

†The Bees, a Poem, ii. 95, Note.