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The Swarm: Sometimes

Sometimes honey from poisonous flowers proves injurious to the young bees, and sometimes bees gather honey from other sources than flowers - if opportunity affords as all know who have watched the primitive sap-boiling in Florida, where the cane is crushed in a wooden mill in the open air, and where the barrel into which the sap runs contains not only cane juice but a crust of honey bees that having come to gorge remain to die, drowned in the too abundant sweet.

Nor do bees disdain the allurements of the cider-mill, though cider when stored in honey-comb is said to prove fatal to the young. And one grieves to learn that bees may, upon occasion, become sad inebriates. "It has been a gross libel upon animals to say that a man has made a beast of himself, when he has drunk to such excess as to lose his reason; but we might without injustice say that he has made a bumble-bee of himself, for those little debauchees are particularly prone to intoxication. Round the nectaries of hollyhocks, you may generally observe a set of determined topers, quaffing as pertinaciously as if they belonged to Wilkes's club; and round about the flower (to follow up the simile) several of the bon vivants will be found lying on the ground inebriated and insensible." Thus quotes Bevan, and immediately adds, "I have frequently seen the ground beneath one of my pear-trees strewed over with hive-bees and wasps, in a similar state, after they had banqueted upon the rich juices of the fallen fruit."

Sometimes plants yield nectar from other organs than the glands of flowers, some of the vetches, for instance, having dark spots on their leaves from which a sweet liquid exudes, and other plants having nectar-yielding glands on leaves or stems.