86 BRITISH BEES. 



from Niebuhr, Savigny, and Sir Gardiner Wilkinson, that 

 upon the Nile it is customary thus to transport the bees 

 from flower-region to flower-region upon rafts contain- 

 ing about four thousand hives, each numbered by the pro- 

 prietors of the hives for identification, who thus double- 

 the seasons by continually shifting their bees from Lower 

 Egypt to the Upper Nile and back again. 



In ancient Greece also, they were conveyed for this 

 purpose from Achaia to Attica ; in the former of these 

 provinces, owing to its higher temperature, flowers 

 had passed their bloom before spring had opened in the 

 latter. All these circumstances tend to show that the 

 experience of bee-masters, both ancient and modern, has 

 ascertained that their insects have not a very extensive 

 range of flight. 



Of the fact that the honey of bees is not always 

 salutary to man, there is a remarkable instance recorded 

 in Xenophon, in his narrative of the retreat of " The Ten 

 Thousand," who reports that upon falling in with quan- 

 tities of it, in Asia Minor, those who indulged in its 

 enjoyment were seized with vertigo, or headache, and 

 violent diarrhoea, attended with sickness, but which had 

 no fatal consequences, although they did not recover 

 from its injurious effects for a couple of days, and were 

 left then in a very prostrated condition. The celebrated 

 physician and botanist Tournefort, when travelling in 

 the East, towards the end of the seventeenth century, 

 found, in the neighbourhood of Trebizonde, an excessive 

 luxuriance of the flowers of the Rhododendron ponticum 

 and of the Azalea pontica, which, although sumptuous 

 in their blossoms, were held in bad repute by the in- 

 habitants, who ascribed to their odour the deleterious 

 effect of causing headache and vertigo. He was thence 



