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 
