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The Swarm: Xenophon

Serious results have sometimes followed the eating of poisonous honey, as in the well-known case of Xenophon's army during the Retreat of the Ten Thousand.

The young general led his forlorn hope back from Asia to Greece, overcoming all obstacles of difficult travel and hostile people, but just before reaching Trebizond on the Euxine Sea his army met a terrible defeat which came not from the hostile men along his route but in a curious way from the bees. Xenophon's forces had put the inhabitants to flight and had quartered themselves in numerous villages where were obtainable abundant supplies and among them a delicacy that was like to have cost Xenophon dear, but we will listen to the story as he himself tells it in the "Anabasis": - "Here, generally speaking, there was nothing to excite their wonderment, but the numbers of bee-hives were indeed astonishing, and so were certain properties of the honey. "The effect upon the soldiers who tasted the combs was, that they all went for the nonce quite off their heads, and Honey suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, with a total inability to stand steady on their legs. A small dose produced a condition not unlike violent drunkenness, a large one an attack very like a fit of madness, and some dropped down, apparently at death's door. So they lay, hundreds of them, as if there had been a great defeat, a prey to the cruellest despondency. But the next day, none had died; and almost at the same hour of the day at which they had eaten they recovered their senses, and on the third or fourth day got on their legs again like convalescents after a severe course of medical treatment."