PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 385 
poses, and they suffer for their want of self-denial. Sometimes whole 
swarms have been destroyed by re 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 
verniz). 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* 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.‘ 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® on her 
hind legs. 
Aristotle says that in each journey from the hive, bees attend only one 
species of flower®; Reaumur, however, seems to think that they fly in- 
discriminately from one to another: but Mr. Dobbs, in the Philosophical 
Transactions *, 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 
ftom particular flowers, the pollen of whose anthers is of those colours. 
Sprengel, as before intimated, has made an observation similar to that of 
1 Nicholson’s Journal, xxiii. 287. 
® Xenoph. Anabas. |. iv. Plin, Hist. Nat. 1. xxi. ce. 13. 
5 Reaum. v. t. xxvi. f, 1. : 
4 Reaum. 295, 
5 Kirby, Monogr. Ap. Angl. i, t. 12. **, e. 1, neut. f. 19. a be 
8 Hist, Anim. |. ix, c. 40, 7 xlvi. 536, 
© Ubi supra, 301, 
na 
