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The Swarm: Heptacometæ

Strabo tells a still more harrowing tale of the honey of Pontus. After describing the mountains and speaking of the savage Heptacometæ who inhabited them he continues : "All the inhabitants of these mountains are quite savage, but the Heptacometæ are more so than all the others. The Heptacometæ cut off three of Pompey's cohorts, as they were passing through the mountains, by placing on their road vessels filled with maddening honey, which is procured from the branches of trees. The men who had tasted the honey and lost their senses were attacked and easily despatched." 1 Pliny has a good deal to say of poisonous honey: - "Indeed, the food of bees is of the very greatest importance as it is owing to this that we meet with poisonous honey even. At Heraclita in Pontus the honey is extremely pernicious in certain years, though it is the same bees that make it at other times. Ægalethron (goat's death) proves fatal to beasts of burden and particularly to goats, and its blossoms steeped in the rains of a wet spring contract most noxious properties."

The beautiful rhododendron flowers that are abundant 1 Not all of the honey of Pontus was poisonous, however, as that made from the balm held a very high place. in Pontus are accused of being this "goat's death," the source of the poisonous honey.

Pliny speaks too of maddening honey: - "In the country of the Sanni, in the same part of Pontus, there is another kind of honey, which causes madness and is called 'mænomenon.' It is attributed to the flowers of the rhododendron with which the woods there abound. Although the people pay a tribute to the Romans in wax they derive no profits whatever from the honey in consequence of these dangerous properties. "In Persis, too, and in Sætulia, a district of Mauritania Cæsariensis, bordering on the country of the Massæsyli, there are poison honeycombs found; and some too only partly so, one of the most insidious things that possibly could happen were it not that the livid color of the honey gives timely notice of its noxious qualities. What can we suppose to have possibly been the intention of Nature in thus laying these traps in our way, giving us honey that is poisonous in some years and good in others, poisonous in some parts of the combs and not in others, and that, too, the produce in all cases of the self-same bees? "It was not enough, forsooth, to have produced a substance in which poison might be administered without the slightest difficulty, but must she herself administer it as well in the honey, to fall in the way of so many animated beings? What in fact can have been her motive except to render mankind a little more cautious and somewhat less greedy?"

Pliny also describes a honey, to be coveted by the housewives of to-day, though it possessed but the one good quality. "Upon Mount Carma in the Island of Crete, which is nine miles in circuit, there is not a fly to be found and honey made there no fly will touch. By this circumstance Honey honey coming from there is usually tested; it is highly prized for medical preparations."

The rhododendrons and the laurels, that make the northern woods and the southern mountains of North America so gorgeous in the spring and summer, are still as poisonous as are members of the same family in Asia Minor; though the bees here do not, as a rule, work upon these questionable sweets. That upon occasion they may do so however the following goes to prove : - "Dr. Barton, in the American Philosophical Transactions, says that in the autumn and winter of 1790, the honey collected near Philadelphia proved fatal to many, in consequence of which a minute inquiry was instituted under the direction of the American Government, and it was ascertained satisfactorily that the fatal honey had been chiefly extracted from the flowers of the Kalmia latifolia. Still more recently, two persons at New York are said to have lost their lives by eating wild honey, which was supposed to have been gathered from the flowers of the dwarf laurel, a thriving shrub in the American woods."

The same authority speaks of death having ensued from eating the common American pheasant which had fed on the leaves of the Kalmia latifolia, showing the extremely pernicious quality of this beautiful shrub.