There is no creature with which man has surrounded himself that seems so
much like a product of civilization, so much like the result of
development on special lines and in special fields, as the honey-bee.
Indeed, a colony of bees, with their neatness and love of order, their
division of labor, their public-spiritedness, their thrift, their
complex economies, and their inordinate love of gain, seems as far
removed from a condition of rude nature as does a walled city or a
cathedral town. Our native bee, on the other hand, the "burly, dozing
humblebee," affects one more like the rude, untutored savage. He has
learned nothing from experience. He lives from hand to mouth. He
luxuriates in time of plenty, and he starves in times of scarcity. He
lives in a rude nest, or in a hole in the ground, and in small
communities; he builds a few deep cells or sacks in which he stores a
little honey and bee-bread for his young, but as a worker in wax he is
of the most primitive and awkward. The Indian regarded the honey-bee as
an ill-omen. She was the white man's fly. In fact she was the epitome of
the white man himself. She has the white man's craftiness, his industry,
his architectural skill, his neatness and love of system, his foresight;
and, above all, his eager, miserly habits. The honey-bee's great
ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to possess the sweet of
every flower that blooms. She is more than provident. Enough will not
satisfy her; she must have all she can get by hook or by crook. She
comes from the oldest country, Asia, and thrives best in the most
fertile and long-settled lands.
Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essentially a wild creature,
and never has been and cannot be thoroughly domesticated. Its proper
home is the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on going; and
thither many do go in spite of the care and watchfulness of the
bee-keeper. If the woods in any given locality are deficient in trees
with suitable cavities, the bees resort to all sorts of makeshifts; they
go into chimneys, into barns and out-houses, under stones, into rocks,
and so forth. Several chimneys in my locality with disused flues are
taken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every season. One day,
while bee-hunting, I developed a line that went toward a farmhouse where
I had reason to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up and
questioned the farmer about his bees. He said he kept no bees, but that
a swarm had taken possession of his chimney, and another had gone under
the clapboards in the gable end of his house. He had taken a large lot
of honey out of both places the year before. Another farmer told me that
one day his family had seen a number of bees examining a knothole in the
side of his house; the next day, as they were sitting down to dinner,
their attention was attracted by a loud humming noise, when they
discovered a swarm of bees settling upon the side of the house and
pouring into the knothole. In subsequent years other swarms came to the
same place.
Apparently every swarm of bees, before it leaves the parent hive, sends
out exploring parties to look up the future home. The woods and groves
are searched through and through, and no doubt the privacy of many a
squirrel and many a wood-mouse is intruded upon. What cozy nooks and
retreats they do spy out, so much more attractive than the painted hive
in the garden, so much cooler in summer and so much warmer in winter!
The bee is in the main an honest citizen: she prefers legitimate to
illegitimate business; she is never an outlaw until her proper sources
of supply fail; she will not touch honey as long as honey yielding
flowers can be found; she always prefers to go to the fountain-head, and
dislikes to take her sweets at second hand. But in the fall, after the
flowers have failed, she can be tempted. The bee-hunter takes advantage
of this fact; he betrays her with a little honey. He wants to steal her
stores, and he first encourages her to steal his, then follows the thief
home with her booty. This is the whole trick of the bee-hunter. The bees
never suspect his game, else by taking a circuitous route they could
easily baffle him. But the honey-bee has absolutely no wit or cunning
outside of her special gifts as a gatherer and storer of honey. She is a
simple-minded creature, and can be imposed upon by any novice. Yet it is
not every novice that can find a bee-tree. The sportsman may track his
game to its retreat by the aid of his dog, but in hunting the honey-bee
one must be his own dog, and track his game through an element in which
it leaves no trail. It is a task for a sharp, quick eye, and may test
the resources of the best woodcraft. One autumn, when I devoted much
time to this pursuit, as the best means of getting at nature and the
open-air exhilaration, my eye became so trained that bees were nearly as
easy to it as birds. I saw and heard bees wherever I went. One day,
standing on a street corner in a great city, I saw above the trucks and
the traffic a line of bees carrying off sweets from some grocery or
confectionery shop.
One looks upon the woods with a new interest when he suspects they hold
a colony of bees. What a pleasing secret it is,--a tree with a heart of
comb honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of Sicily or Mount
Hymettus stowed away in its trunk or branches; secret chambers where
lies hidden the wealth of ten thousand little freebooters, great nuggets
and wedges of precious ore gathered with risk and labor from every field
and wood about!
But if you would know the delights of bee-hunting, and how many sweets
such a trip yields beside honey, come with me some bright, warm, late
September or early October day. It is the golden season of the year, and
any errand or pursuit that takes us abroad upon the hills or by the
painted woods and along the amber-colored streams at such a time is
enough. So, with haversacks filled with grapes and peaches and apples
and a bottle of milk,--for we shall not be home to dinner,--and armed
with a compass, a hatchet, a pail, and a box with a piece of comb honey
neatly fitted into it,--any box the size of your hand with a lid will do
nearly as well as the elaborate and ingenious contrivance of the regular
bee-hunter,--we sally forth. Our course at first lies along the highway
under great chestnut-trees whose nuts are just dropping, then through an
orchard and across a little creek, thence gently rising through a long
series of cultivated fields toward some high uplying land behind which
rises a rugged wooded ridge or mountain, the most sightly point in all
this section. Behind this ridge for several miles the country is wild,
wooded, and rocky, and is no doubt the home of many wild swarms of bees.
What a gleeful uproar the robins, cedar-birds, high-holes, and cow
blackbirds make amid the black cherry trees as we pass along! The
raccoons, too, have been here after black cherries, and we see their
marks at various points. Several crows are walking about a newly sowed
wheatfield we pass through, and we pause to note their graceful
movements and glossy coats. I have seen no bird walk the ground with
just the same air the crow does. It is not exactly pride; there is no
strut or swagger in it, though perhaps just a little condescension; it
is the contented, complaisant, and self-possessed gait of a lord over
his domains. All these acres are mine, he says, and all these crops; men
plow and sow for me, and I stay here or go there, and find life sweet
and good wherever I am. The hawk looks awkward and out of place on the
ground; the game-birds hurry and skulk; but the crow is at home, and
treads the earth as if there were none to molest or make him afraid.
The crows we have always with us, but it is not every day or every
season that one sees an eagle. Hence I must preserve the memory of one I
saw the last day I went bee-hunting. As I was laboring up the side of a
mountain at the head of a valley, the noble bird sprang from the top of
a dry tree above me and came sailing directly over my head. I saw him
bend his eye down upon me, and I could hear the low hum of his plumage
as if the web of every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong,
level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could hold him. When he
was fairly clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement
in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went, without once breaking his
majestic poise, till he appeared to sight some far-off alien geography,
when he bent his course thitherward and gradually vanished in the blue
depths. The eagle is a bird of large ideas; he embraces long distances;
the continent is his home. I never look upon one without emotion; I
follow him with my eye as long as I can. I think of Canada, of the Great
Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains, of the wild and sounding seacoast. The
waters are his, and the woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces
behind the veil of the storm, and his joy is height and depth and vast
spaces.
We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in the edge of the woods,
and are lucky to find a single scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seems
almost to light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Beside a
ditch in a field beyond, we find the great blue lobelia, and near it,
amid the weeds and wild grasses and purple asters, the most beautiful of
our fall flowers, the fringed gentian. What a rare and delicate, almost
aristocratic look the gentian has amid its coarse, unkempt surroundings!
It does not lure the bee, but it lures and holds every passing human
eye. If we strike through the corner of yonder woods, where the ground
is moistened by hidden springs, and where there is a little opening amid
the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, a rare flower in this
locality. I had walked this way many times before I chanced upon its
retreat, and then I was following a line of bees. I lost the bees, but I
got the gentians. How curious this flower looks with its deep blue
petals folded together so tightly,--a bud and yet a blossom! It is the
nun among our wild flowers,--a form closely veiled and cloaked. The
buccaneer bumblebee sometimes tries to rifle it of its sweets. I have
seen the blossom with the bee entombed in it. He had forced his way into
the virgin corolla as if determined to know its secret, but he had never
returned with the knowledge he had gained.
After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we reach a point where we
will make our first trial,--a high stone wall that runs parallel with
the wooded ridge referred to, and separated from it by a broad field.
There are bees at work there on that goldenrod, and it requires but
little manœuvering to sweep one into our box. Almost any other
creature rudely and suddenly arrested in its career, and clapped into a
cage in this way, would show great confusion and alarm. The bee is
alarmed for a moment, but the bee has a passion stronger than its love
of life or fear of death, namely, desire for honey, not simply to eat,
but to carry home as booty. "Such rage of honey in their bosom beats,"
says Virgil. It is quick to catch the scent of honey in the box, and as
quick to fall to filling itself. We now set the box down upon the wall
and gently remove the cover. The bee is head and shoulders in one of the
half-filled cells, and is oblivious to everything else about it. Come
rack, come ruin, it will die at work. We step back a few paces, and sit
down upon the ground so as to bring the box against the blue sky as a
background. In two or three minutes the bee is seen rising slowly and
heavily from the box. It seems loath to leave so much honey behind, and
it marks the place well. It mounts aloft in a rapidly increasing spiral,
surveying the near and minute objects first, then the larger and more
distant, till, having circled above the spot five or six times and taken
all its bearings, it darts away for home. It is a good eye that holds
fast to the bee till it is fairly off. Sometimes one's head will swim
following it, and often one's eyes are put out by the sun. This bee
gradually drifts down the hill, then strikes away toward a farmhouse
half a mile away where I know bees are kept. Then we try another and
another, and the third bee, much to our satisfaction, goes straight
toward the woods. We could see the brown speck against the darker
background for many yards. The regular bee-hunter professes to be able
to tell a wild bee from a tame one by the color, the former, he says,
being lighter. But there is no difference; they are both alike in color
and in manner. Young bees are lighter than old, and that is all there is
of it. If a bee lived many years in the woods it would doubtless come to
have some distinguishing marks, but the life of a bee is only a few
months at the farthest, and no change is wrought in this brief time.
Our bees are all soon back, and more with them, for we have touched the
box here and there with the cork of a bottle of anise oil, and this
fragrant and pungent oil will attract bees half a mile or more. When no
flowers can be found, this is the quickest way to obtain a bee.
It is a singular fact that when the bee first finds the hunter's box,
its first feeling is one of anger; it is as mad as a hornet; its tone
changes, it sounds its shrill war trumpet and darts to and fro, and
gives vent to its rage and indignation in no uncertain manner. It seems
to scent foul play at once. It says, "Here is robbery; here is the spoil
of some hive, may be my own," and its blood is up. But its ruling
passion soon comes to the surface, its avarice gets the better of its
indignation, and it seems to say, "Well, I had better take possession of
this and carry it home." So after many feints and approaches and
dartings off with a loud angry hum as if it would none of it, the bee
settles down and fills itself.
It does not entirely cool off and get soberly to work till it has made
two or three trips home with its booty. When other bees come, even if
all from the same swarm, they quarrel and dispute over the box, and clip
and dart at each other like bantam cocks. Apparently the ill feeling
which the sight of the honey awakens is not one of jealousy or rivalry,
but wrath.
A bee will usually make three or four trips from the hunter's box before
it brings back a companion. I suspect the bee does not tell its fellows
what it has found, but that they smell out the secret; it doubtless
bears some evidence with it upon its feet or proboscis that it has been
upon honeycomb and not upon flowers, and its companions take the hint
and follow, arriving always many seconds behind. Then the quantity and
quality of the booty would also betray it. No doubt, also, there are
plenty of gossips about a hive that note and tell everything. "Oh, did
you see that? Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago in great haste, and
one of the upstairs packers says she was loaded till she groaned with
apple-blossom honey, which she deposited, and then rushed off again like
mad. Apple-blossom honey in October! Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smell
something! Let's after."
In about half an hour we have three well-defined lines of bees
established,--two to farmhouses and one to the woods, and our box is
being rapidly depleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes to the
woods, and now that they have learned the way thoroughly they do not
make the long preliminary whirl above the box, but start directly from
it. The woods are rough and dense and the hill steep, and we do not like
to follow the line of bees until we have tried at least to settle the
problem as to the distance they go into the woods,--whether the tree is
on this side of the ridge or into the depth of the forest on the other
side. So we shut up the box when it is full of bees and carry it about
three hundred yards along the wall from which we are operating. When
liberated, the bees, as they always will in such cases, go off in the
same directions they have been going; they do not seem to know that they
have been moved. But other bees have followed our scent, and it is not
many minutes before a second line to the woods is established. This is
called cross-lining the bees. The new line makes a sharp angle with the
other line, and we know at once that the tree is only a few rods into
the woods. The two lines we have established form two sides of a
triangle of which the wall is the base; at the apex of the triangle, or
where the two lines meet in the woods, we are sure to find the tree. We
quickly follow up these lines, and where they cross each other on the
side of the hill we scan every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an
oak and examine a hole near the root; now the bees are in this tree and
their entrance is on the upper side near the ground not two feet from
the hole I peer into, and yet so quiet and secret is their going and
coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up the hill. Failing in
this direction I return to the oak again, and then perceive the bees
going out in a small crack in the tree. The bees do not know they are
found out and that the game is in our hands, and are as oblivious of our
presence as if we were ants or crickets. The indications are that the
swarm is a small one, and the store of honey trifling. In "taking up" a
bee-tree it is usual first to kill or stupefy the bees with the fumes of
burning sulphur or with tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable
on the present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly assault the tree
with an ax we have procured. At the first blow the bees set up a loud
buzzing, but we have no mercy, and the side of the cavity is soon cut
away and the interior with its white-yellow mass of comb honey is
exposed, and not a bee strikes a blow in defense of its all. This may
seem singular, but it has nearly always been my experience. When a swarm
of bees are thus rudely assaulted with an ax they evidently think the
end of the world has come, and, like true misers as they are, each one
seizes as much of the treasure as it can hold; in other words, they all
fall to and gorge themselves with honey, and calmly await the issue.
While in this condition they make no defense, and will not sting unless
taken hold of. In fact they are as harmless as flies. Bees are always to
be managed with boldness and decision. Any half-way measures, any timid
poking about, any feeble attempts to reach their honey, are sure to be
quickly resented. The popular notion that bees have a special antipathy
toward certain persons and a liking for certain others has only this
fact at the bottom of it: they will sting a person who is afraid of them
and goes skulking and dodging about, and they will not sting a person
who faces them boldly and has no dread of them. They are like dogs. The
way to disarm a vicious dog is to show him you do not fear him; it is
his turn to be afraid then. I never had any dread of bees and am seldom
stung by them. I have climbed up into a large chestnut that contained a
swarm in one of its cavities and chopped them out with an ax, being
obliged at times to pause and brush the bewildered bees from my hands
and face, and not been stung once. I have chopped a swarm out of an
apple-tree in June, and taken out the cards of honey and arranged them
in a hive, and then dipped out the bees with a dipper, and taken the
whole home with me in pretty good condition, with scarcely any
opposition on the part of the bees. In reaching your hand into the
cavity to detach and remove the comb you are pretty sure to get stung,
for when you touch the "business end" of a bee, it will sting even
though its head be off. But the bee carries the antidote to its own
poison. The best remedy for bee sting is honey, and when your hands are
besmeared with honey, as they are sure to be on such occasions, the
wound is scarcely more painful than the prick of a pin. Assault your
bee-tree, then, boldly with your ax, and you will find that when the
honey is exposed every bee has surrendered and the whole swarm is
cowering in helpless bewilderment and terror. Our tree yields only a few
pounds of honey, not enough to have lasted the swarm till January, but
no matter: we have the less burden to carry.
In the afternoon we go nearly half a mile farther along the ridge to a
cornfield that lies immediately in front of the highest point of the
mountain. The view is superb; the ripe autumn landscape rolls away to
the east, cut through by the great placid river; in the extreme north
the wall of the Catskills stands out clear and strong, while in the
south the mountains of the Highlands bound the view. The day is warm,
and the bees are very busy there in that neglected corner of the field,
rich in asters, fleabane, and goldenrod. The corn has been cut, and upon
a stout but a few rods from the woods, which here drop quickly down from
the precipitous heights, we set up our bee-box, touched again with the
pungent oil. In a few moments a bee has found it; she comes up to
leeward, following the scent. On leaving the box, she goes straight
toward the woods. More bees quickly come, and it is not long before the
line is well established. Now we have recourse to the same tactics we
employed before, and move along the ridge to another field to get our
cross line. But the bees still go in almost the same direction they did
from the corn stout. The tree is then either on the top of the mountain
or on the other or west side of it. We hesitate to make the plunge into
the woods and seek to scale those precipices, for the eye can plainly
see what is before us. As the afternoon sun gets lower, the bees are
seen with wonderful distinctness. They fly toward and under the sun, and
are in a strong light, while the near woods which form the background
are in deep shadow. They look like large luminous motes. Their swiftly
vibrating, transparent wings surround their bodies with a shining nimbus
that makes them visible for a long distance. They seem magnified many
times. We see them bridge the little gulf between us and the woods, then
rise up over the treetops with their burdens, swerving neither to the
right hand nor to the left. It is almost pathetic to see them labor so,
climbing the mountain and unwittingly guiding us to their treasures.
When the sun gets down so that his direction corresponds exactly with
the course of the bees, we make the plunge. It proves even harder
climbing than we had anticipated; the mountain is faced by a broken and
irregular wall of rock, up which we pull ourselves slowly and cautiously
by main strength. In half an hour, the perspiration streaming from
every pore, we reach the summit. The trees here are all small, a second
growth, and we are soon convinced the bees are not here. Then down we go
on the other side, clambering down the rocky stairways till we reach
quite a broad plateau that forms something like the shoulder of the
mountain. On the brink of this there are many large hemlocks, and we
scan them closely and rap upon them with our ax. But not a bee is seen
or heard; we do not seem as near the tree as we were in the fields
below; yet, if some divinity would only whisper the fact to us, we are
within a few rods of the coveted prize, which is not in one of the large
hemlocks or oaks that absorb our attention, but in an old stub or stump
not six feet high, and which we have seen and passed several times
without giving it a thought. We go farther down the mountain and beat
about to the right and left, and get entangled in brush and arrested by
precipices, and finally, as the day is nearly spent, give up the search
and leave the woods quite baffled, but resolved to return on the morrow.
The next day we come back and commence operations in an opening in the
woods well down on the side of the mountain where we gave up the search.
Our box is soon swarming with the eager bees, and they go back toward
the summit we have passed. We follow back and establish a new line,
where the ground will permit; then another and still another, and yet
the riddle is not solved. One time we are south of them, then north,
then the bees get up through the trees and we cannot tell where they go.
But after much searching, and after the mystery seems rather to deepen
than to clear up, we chance to pause beside the old stump. A bee comes
out of a small opening like that made by ants in decayed wood, rubs its
eyes and examines its antennæ, as bees always do before leaving their
hive, then takes flight. At the same instant several bees come by us
loaded with our honey and settle home with that peculiar low, complacent
buzz of the well-filled insect. Here, then, is our idyl, our bit of
Virgil and Theocritus, in a decayed stump of a hemlock-tree. We could
tear it open with our hands, and a bear would find it an easy prize, and
a rich one, too, for we take from it fifty pounds of excellent honey.
The bees have been here many years, and have of course sent out swarm
after swarm into the wilds. They have protected themselves against the
weather and strengthened their shaky habitation by a copious use of wax.
When a bee-tree is thus "taken up" in the middle of the day, of course a
good many bees are away from home and have not heard the news. When they
return and find the ground flowing with honey, and piles of bleeding
combs lying about, they apparently do not recognize the place, and their
first instinct is to fall to and fill themselves; this done, their next
thought is to carry it home, so they rise up slowly through the branches
of the trees till they have attained an altitude that enables them to
survey the scene, when they seem to say, "Why, _this_ is home," and down
they come again; beholding the wreck and ruins once more, they still
think there is some mistake, and get up a second or a third time and
then drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic sight of
all, the surviving and bewildered bees struggling to save a few drops of
their wasted treasures.
Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods, robber bees appear.
You may know them by their saucy, chiding, devil-may-care hum. It is an
ill wind that blows nobody good, and they make the most of the
misfortune of their neighbors, and thereby pave the way for their own
ruin. The hunter marks their course and the next day looks them up. On
this occasion the day was hot and the honey very fragrant, and a line of
bees was soon established S. S. W. Though there was much refuse honey
in the old stub, and though little golden rills trickled down the hill
from it, and the near branches and saplings were besmeared with it where
we wiped our murderous hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast
to which not only honey-bees came, but bumblebees, wasps, hornets,
flies, ants. The bumblebees, which at this season are hungry vagrants
with no fixed place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath
the bits of empty comb or fragments of bark and pass the night, and
renew the feast next day. The bumblebee is an insect of which the
bee-hunter sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are
dull and clumsy compared with the honey-bee. Attracted in the fields by
the bee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and
blunder into it in the most stupid, lubberly fashion.
The honey-bees that licked up our leavings on the old stub belonged to a
swarm, as it proved, about half a mile farther down the ridge, and a few
days afterward fate overtook them, and their stores in turn became the
prey of another swarm in the vicinity, which also tempted Providence and
were overwhelmed. The first-mentioned swarm I had lined from several
points, and was following up the clew over rocks and through gulleys,
when I came to where a large hemlock had been felled a few years before,
and a swarm taken from a cavity near the top of it; fragments of the old
comb were yet to be seen. A few yards away stood another short, squatty
hemlock, and I said my bees ought to be there. As I paused near it, I
noticed where the tree had been wounded with an ax a couple of feet from
the ground many years before. The wound had partially grown over, but
there was an opening there that I did not see at the first glance. I was
about to pass on when a bee passed me making that peculiar shrill,
discordant hum that a bee makes when besmeared with honey. I saw it
alight in the partially closed wound and crawl home; then came others
and others, little bands and squads of them heavily freighted with honey
from the box. The tree was about twenty inches through and hollow at the
butt, or from the ax-mark down. This space the bees had completely
filled with honey. With an ax we cut away the outer ring of live wood
and exposed the treasure. Despite the utmost care, we wounded the comb
so that little rills of the golden liquid issued from the root of the
tree and trickled down the hill.
The other bee-tree in the vicinity to which I have referred we found one
warm November day in less than half an hour after entering the woods. It
also was a hemlock that stood in a niche in a wall of hoary,
moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree hardly reached to the top
of the precipice. The bees entered a small hole at the root, which was
seven or eight feet from the ground. The position was a striking one.
Never did apiary have a finer outlook or more rugged surroundings. A
black, wood-embraced lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of the
Catskills filled the far distance, and the more broken outlines of the
Shawangunk range filled the rear. On every hand were precipices and a
wild confusion of rocks and trees.
The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a half long and
eight or ten inches in diameter. With an ax we cut away one side of the
tree, and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of honey. It was a most
pleasing sight. What winding and devious ways the bees had through their
palace! What great masses and blocks of snow-white comb there were!
Where it was sealed up, presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface,
it looked like some precious ore. When we carried a large pailful of it
out of the woods it seemed still more like ore.
Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of the tree by the time
the bee occupies in making its first trip. But this is no certain guide.
You are always safe in calculating that the tree is inside of a mile,
and you need not as a rule look for your bee's return under ten minutes.
One day I picked up a bee in an opening in the woods and gave it honey,
and it made three trips to my box with an interval of about twelve
minutes between them; it returned alone each time; the tree, which I
afterward found, was about half a mile distant.
In lining bees through the woods the tactics of the hunter are to pause
every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or cut down the
trees, and set the bees to work again. If they still go forward, he goes
forward also and repeats his observations till the tree is found, or
till the bees turn and come back upon the trail. Then he knows he has
passed the tree, and he retraces his steps to a convenient distance and
tries again, and thus quickly reduces the space to be looked over till
the swarm is traced home. On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where
the surface alternated between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick,
heavy growths of timber and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a
tempest-tossed sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and set
them to work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet
distant. One would have expected them under such circumstances to have
gone straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but they
did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude
above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled me for
hours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with the woods only
from the top side, and from the air above; they recognize home only by
landmarks here, and in every instance they rise aloft to take their
bearings. Think how familiar to them the topography of the forest
summits must be,--an umbrageous sea or plain where every mark and point
is known.
Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a bee-tree
sooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are only a few
yards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in the near at
hand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant field, they are
lured by the remote and the difficult, and hence overlook the flower and
the sweet at their very door. On several occasions I have unwittingly
set my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and waited long for bees
without getting them, when, on removing to a distant field or opening in
the woods, I have got a clew at once.
I have a theory that when bees leave the hive, unless there is some
special attraction in some other direction, they generally go against
the wind. They would thus have the wind with them when they returned
home heavily laden, and with these little navigators the difference is
an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a great
hindrance, but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with more ease.
Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as ballast, but their only ballast
is their honey-bag. Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to
windward of the woods in which the swarm is supposed to have refuge.
Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do water their
honey, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then of course thicker
and sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence old bee-hunters look for
bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the woods. I once found a
tree a long distance from any water, and the honey had a peculiar bitter
flavor, imparted to it, I was convinced, by rainwater sucked from the
decayed and spongy hemlock-tree in which the swarm was found. In cutting
into the tree, the north side of it was found to be saturated with
water like a spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a bitter
flavor. The bees had thus found a spring or a cistern in their own
house.
Bees are exposed to many hardships and many dangers. Winds and storms
prove as disastrous to them as to other navigators. Black spiders lie in
wait for them as do brigands for travelers. One day, as I was looking
for a bee amid some goldenrod, I spied one partly concealed under a
leaf. Its baskets were full of pollen, and it did not move. On lifting
up the leaf I discovered that a hairy spider was ambushed there and had
the bee by the throat. The vampire was evidently afraid of the bee's
sting, and was holding it by the throat till quite sure of its death.
Virgil speaks of the painted lizard, perhaps a species of salamander, as
an enemy of the honey-bee. We have no lizard that destroys the bee; but
our tree-toad, ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms, snaps them
up wholesale. Quick as lightning that subtle but clammy tongue darts
forth, and the unsuspecting bee is gone. Virgil also accuses the
titmouse and the woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and our kingbird
has been charged with the like crime, but the latter devours only the
drones. The workers are either too small and quick for it or else it
dreads their sting.
Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the
honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If
he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard to
see how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad carried
a gravel stone for ballast.
"And as when empty barks on billows float,
With sandy ballast sailors trim the boat;
So bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight;"
or that, when two colonies made war upon each other, they issued forth
from their hives led by their kings and fought in the air, strewing the
ground with the dead and dying:--
"Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain,
Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain."
It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had we should
have had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that bees sometimes
escaped to the woods:--
"Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found
In chambers of their own beneath the ground:
Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices,
And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees."
Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their brothers in
the hive. The only difference is, that wild honey is flavored with your
adventure, which makes it a little more delectable than the domestic
article.
[From _Pepacton_, by John Burroughs. Copyright, 1881, 1895, and
1909, by John Burroughs.]