enemy of the birds and the lesser animals, the weasel.
A farmer one day heard a queer growling sound in the grass; on
approaching the spot he saw two weasels contending over a mouse; each
had hold of the mouse pulling in opposite directions, and were so
absorbed in the struggle that the farmer cautiously put his hands down
and grabbed them both by the back of the neck. He put them in a cage,
and offered them bread and other food. This they refused to eat, but in
a few days one of them had eaten the other up, picking his bones clean
and leaving nothing but the skeleton.
The same farmer was one day in his cellar when two rats came out of a
hole near him in great haste, and ran up the cellar wall and along its
top till they came to a floor timber that stopped their progress, when
they turned at bay, and looked excitedly back along the course they had
come. In a moment a weasel, evidently in hot pursuit of them, came out
of the hole, and seeing the farmer, checked his course and darted back.
The rats had doubtless turned to give him fight, and would probably have
been a match for him.
The weasel seems to track its game by scent. A hunter of my acquaintance
was one day sitting in the woods, when he saw a red squirrel run with
great speed up a tree near him, and out upon a long branch, from which
he leaped to some rocks, and disappeared beneath them. In a moment a
weasel came in full course upon his trail, ran up the tree, then out
along the branch, from the end of which he leaped to the rocks as the
squirrel did, and plunged beneath them.
Doubtless the squirrel fell a prey to him. The squirrel's best game
would have been to have kept to the higher tree-tops, where he could
easily have distanced the weasel. But beneath the rocks he stood a very
poor chance. I have often wondered what keeps such an animal as the
weasel in check, for weasels are quite rare. They never need go hungry,
for rats and squirrels and mice and birds are everywhere. They probably
do not fall a prey to any other animal, and very rarely to man. But
the circumstances or agencies that check the increase of any species of
animal are, as Darwin says, very obscure and but little known.
BEES.
AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.
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
humble-bee," 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 honeybee'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 outhouses, 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 farm-house
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 knot-hole 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 knot-hole. 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 wood-craft. 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 black-birds 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 wheat field 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 him 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 off 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 sea-coast. 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 (Lobelia
syphilitica), 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 curiously 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 bumble-bee 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
maneuvering 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 about 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 farm-house 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 honey-comb 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 up-stairs 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 farm-houses 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 in 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 sulfur 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.
When 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.