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 quantities of it, in Asia Minor, those who indulged in its enjoyment were seized with vertigo, or headache, and violent diarrhœa, 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 inhabitants, who ascribed to their odour the deleterious effect of causing headache and vertigo. He was thence induced to surmise that these had possibly been the flowers the bees had extracted the honey from which had been so baneful to the troops of Xenophon. But it seems that bees themselves cannot collect with impunity the honey of noxious flowers, for they are occasionally subject to a disease resembling vertigo, from which they do not recover, and which is attributed to the poisonous nature of the flowers they have been recently visiting. Several different kinds of honey and wax have been described, but some degree of uncertainty exists as to whether they are all the produce of genuine species of the genus _Apis_; for it will be found, in a rapid notice I purpose giving of the more conspicuous genera of foreign bees, that there are two exotic genera of this section of the family, both social in their habits, and which both produce the same materials; there is a wasp also that makes honey. But of all the many kinds of honey noticed, the green kind furnished to Western India by the island of Réunion, the produce of an _Apis_ indigenous to Madagascar, but which has been naturalized in the French island, and also in the Mauritius, is perhaps the most remarkable. It is of a thick syrupy consistency, and has a peculiar aroma. It is much esteemed upon the most proximate coasts of the peninsula of India, where it bears a high price. Whether its greenness of colour is derived from the flowers which this species frequents, or whether it be incidental to the nature of the bee, has not been ascertained, but the honey of the South American wasp, the sole species producing the material, has also a green tinge.