PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 385 



poses, and they suffer for their want of self-denial. Sometimes whole 

 swarms have been destroyed by merely alighting upon poisonous trees. 

 This happened to one in the county of West Chester in the province of 

 New York, which settled upon the branches of the poison-ash (Rhus 

 vernix). On the following morning the imprudent animals were all found 

 dead, and swelled to more than double their usual size. 1 Whether the 

 honey extracted from the species of the genus Kalmia, Andromeda, Rhodo- 

 dendron, &c., be hurtful to the bees themselves, is not ascertained ; but, as 

 has been before observed, it is often poisonous to man ; and that found at 

 Trebisond on the Euxine coast, as I have formerly noticed, threatened fatal 

 effects to such of the Greek army, in the celebrated retreat after the death 

 of the younger Cyrus, as partook of it. Pliny, who mentions this honey, 

 calls it Mcenomenon, and observes that it is said to be collected from a 

 kind of Rhododendron, of which Tournefort noticed two species there. 2 



When the stomach of a bee is filled with nectar, it next, by means of 

 the feathered hairs 3 with which its body is covered, pilfers from the flowers 

 the fertilising dust of the anthers, the pollen; which is equally necessary 

 to the society with the honey, and may be named the ambrosia of the hive, 

 since from it the bee-bread is made. Sometimes a bee is so discoloured 

 with this powder as to look like a different insect, becoming white, yellow, 

 or orange, according to the flowers in which it has been busy. Reaumur 

 was urged to visit the hives of a gentleman who on this account thought 

 his bees were different from the common kind- 4 He suspected, and it 

 proved, that the circumstance just mentioned occasioned the mistaken 

 notion. When the body of the bee is covered with farina, with the brushes 

 of its legs, especially of the hind ones, it wipes it off; not as we do with 

 our dusty clothes, to dissipate and disperse it in the air, but to collect 

 every particle of it, and then to knead it and form it into two little masses, 

 which she places, one in each, in the baskets formed by hairs 5 on her 

 hind legs. 



Aristotle says that in each journey from the hive, bees attend only one 

 species of flower 6 ; Reaumur, however, seems to think that they fly in- 

 discriminately from one to another : but Mr. Dobbs, in the Philosophical 

 Transactions 7 , and Butler before him, asserts that he has frequently followed 

 a bee engaged in collecting pollen, &c., and invariably observed that it 

 continued collecting from the same kind of flowers with which it first be- 

 gan ; passing over every other species, however numerous, even though 

 the flower it first selected was scarcer than others. His observations, he 

 thinks, are confirmed, and the idea seems not unreasonable, by the uniform 

 colour of the pellets of pollen, and their different size. Reaumur himself 

 tells us that the bees enter the hive, some with yellow pellets, others with 

 red ones, others again with whitish ones, and that sometimes they are even 

 green : upon which he observes, that this arises from their being collected 

 from particular flowers, the pollen of whose anthers is of those colours. 8 

 Sprengel, as before intimated, has made an observation similar to that of 



1 Nicholson's Journal, xxiii. 287. 



2 Xenoph. Anabas. 1. iv. Plin. Hist. Nat. 1. xxi. c. 13. 



3 Reaum. v. t. xxvi. f. 1. 



4 Reaum. 295. 



5 Kirby, Monogr. Ap. Angl i. t. .12. * *. e. 1. neut. f. 19. a. ft. 



6 Hist. Anim. 1. ix. c. 40. . * x lvi. 536. 

 8 Ubi supra, 301. 



C C 



