Honey and Venom by Andrew Coté
Author:Andrew Coté [Coté, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00
JULY
And your Lord inspired to the bee, “Take for yourself among the mountains, houses, and among the trees and [in] that which they construct. Then eat from all the fruits and follow the ways of your Lord laid down [for you].” There emerges from their bellies a drink, varying in colors, in which there is healing for people.
—Qur’an, 16:68–69
Honey bees, and other bees and wasps, reputedly have a long history of being dragged into warfare by humans and used as weapons. A couple of thousand years ago, the Heptakomites purposely left poisoned honey along the route of their adversaries, the Roman soldiers. This honey, made from rhododendron nectar, was harmless to honey bees but unsafe for human consumption. Hence, when one thousand advancing Romans found the honey, they ate it, fell quite ill, and were easily overpowered by their enemies.*1 For their part, Romans also are said to have employed bees in their arsenal from time to time, catapulting them into the thick of their enemies. Upon landing, the hives would burst and tens of thousands of angry bees (or hornets or wasps) would engage the enemy on the Romans’ behalf. Aside from the Romans, the ancient Greeks are credited to have used bees as tiny soldiers in war. In addition to catapulting beehives over the walls of besieged cities, the defenders of Themiscyra, a Greek town best known at the time for producing exquisite honey, defeated the encroaching Romans in 72 B.C. by funneling swarms of bees into the mines beneath the walls of the city—straight into the faces of the enemy. Fast-forwarding another thousand years or so, Richard I of England is alleged to have used bees as catapult-launched bombs against the Saracens during the Third Crusade in the twelfth century. There are examples from the American Civil War of bees and apiaries disrupting battles and troop movements; they were used, at least on one occasion, as a practical joke against the captain of a regiment. “I recall an incident occurring in the Tenth Vermont Regiment—once brigaded with my company—when some of the foragers, who had been out on a tramp, brought a hive of bees into camp, after the men had wrapped themselves in their blankets, and, by way of a joke, set it down stealthily on the stomach of the captain of one of the companies, making business quite lively in that neighborhood shortly afterwards.”*2 But it wasn’t all fun and games, of course. A Union soldier named Lieutenant Robertson from New York’s Ninety-third Regiment, while in Virginia, recounted, “To advance was impossible, to retreat was death, for in the great struggle that raged there, there were few merely wounded….The bullets sang like swarming bees, and their sting was death.”
During the Great War, the Germans gained an advantage during the Battle of Tanga, also known as the Battle of the Bees, fought near the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in what is now Tanzania, when several beehives were disturbed by gunfire and the bees angrily
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