PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 181 
Sometimes whole swarms have been destroyed by merely 
alighting upon poisonous trees. This happened to cne 
in the county of West Chester in the province of New 
York, which settled upon the branches of the poison-ash 
(fihus Vernix, L.). In the following morning the im- 
prudent animals were all found dead, and swelled to 
. more than double their usual size?. Whether the honey 
extracted from the species of the genus Kalmia, Andro- 
meda, Rhododendron, &c. be hurtful to the bees them- 
selves, is not ascertained; but, as has been before ob- 
served, it is often poisonous to man’. The Greeks, as 
you probably recollect, in their celebrated retreat after 
the death of the younger Cyrus, found a kind of honey 
at Trebisond on the Euxine coast, which, though it 
produced no fatal effects upon them, rendered those who 
ate but little, like men very drunk, and those who ate 
much, like mad men or dying persons; and numbers lay 
upon the ground as if there had been a defeat. Pliny, 
who mentions this honey, calls it maenomenon, and ob- 
serves that it is said to be collected from a kind of I?hodo- 
dendron, of which 'Tournefort noticed two species there°. 
When the stomach of a bee is filled with nectar, it 
next, by meansof the feathered hairs? with which its 
body is covered, pilfers from the flowers the fertilizing 
dust of the anthers, the pollen; which is equally necessary 
to the society with the honey, and may be named the am- 
brosia 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 
@ Nicholson’s Journal, xxiti. 287. ’ Von. L. 4th Ed. 142. 
© Xenoph. Anaéas. |.iv. Plin. Hist. Nat. |. xxi. c. 13. 
COReauml, vate. fo le 
