Insect miscellanies / [by James Rennie].

  • James Rennie
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insect miscellanies / [by James Rennie]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    47/436 page 31
    As the goat relishes the taste of the poisonous water-hemlock, so our soft-billed birds will also feed on poisonous berries. We have not heard of any bad consequences to those who eat goat’s flesh, nor to the Italian amateurs of beca-ficos, though the latter have been partly fattened on the deleterious berries of the laurel or the nightshade ; but in Ame- rica, birds eaten after they have fed on the fruit of the kalmia are reported to have produced fatal con- sequences The flowers of the latter plant also, and several others ranked as virulent poisons, are frequently robbed of their honey by bees, whose taste does not seem to intimate the existence of any dele- terious quality, no more than does the taste of people who afterwards partake of such honey to their cost. It is not mentioned, indeed, that this honey, so fatal to man, is at all injurious to the bees by which it is collected ; though Dr. Darwin tells us, that the bees are well aware of the sorts of honey which would injure themselves, and will not therefore touch it t- “ Perhaps,” says the elder Huber, “ the sense of taste is the least perfect of those enjoyed by bees; for, contrary to the received opinion, they display little choice in collecting honey ; nor do they testify greater nicety in the quality of their water, for the most corrupted marshes and ditches seem to be pre- ferred to the most limpid streams, nay, even to dew itself. Nothing, therefore, is more unequal than the quality of honey, the produce of one district dif- fering from another, and the honey of spring being unlike that of autumn ; while even the contents of one hive do not always resemble those of the one which is contiguous. But though bees are thus not * See Dr. Schumacher’s Cases in Anderson’s Journ, iii. 456. t Temple of Nature.
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