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, flea-bane, and golden-rod. 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 tree-tops 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 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 antennae 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 bumble-bees, wasps, hornets, flies,
ants. The bumble-bees, 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 bumble-bee 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-bee 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 pail full 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
land-marks 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 mask 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 taken
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 golden-rod, 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 hive. The only difference is that wild honey is flavored with your
adventure, which makes it a little more delectable than the domestic
article.
THE PASTORAL BEES
The honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring like the dove from
Noah's ark, and it is not till after many days that she brings back the
olive leaf, which in this case is a pellet of golden pollen upon each
hip, usually obtained from the alder or the swamp willow. In a country
where maple sugar is made, the bees get their first taste of sweet from
the sap as it flows from the spiles, or as it dries and is condensed
upon the sides of the buckets. They will sometimes, in their eagerness,
come about the boiling place and be overwhelmed by the steam and the
smoke. But bees appear to be more eager for bread in the spring than for
honey; their supply of this article, perhaps, does not keep as well
as their stores of the latter, hence fresh bread, in the shape of new
pollen, is diligently sought for. My bees get their first supplies from
the catkins of the willows. How quickly they find them out. If but one
catkin opens anywhere within range, a bee is on hand that very hour to
rifle it, and it is a most pleasing experience to stand near the hive
some mild April day and see them come pouring in with their little
baskets packed with this first fruitage of the spring. They will have
new bread now; they have been to mill in good earnest; see their dusty
coats, and the golden grist they bring home with them.
When a bee brings pollen into the hive, he advances to the cell in which
it is to be deposited and kicks it off as one might his overalls or
rubber boots, making one foot help the other; then he walks off without
ever looking behind him; another bee, one of the indoor hands, comes
along and rams it down with his head and packs it into the cell as the
dairymaid packs butter into a firkin.
The first spring wild-flowers, whose shy faces among the dry leaves and
rocks are so welcome, yield no honey. The anemone, the hepatica, the
bloodroot, the arbutus, the numerous violets, the spring beauty, the
corydalis, etc., woo lovers of nature, but do not woo the honey-loving
bee. It requires more sun and warmth to develop the saccharine element,
and the beauty of these pale striplings of the woods and groves is their
sole and sufficient excuse for being. The arbutus, lying low and keeping
green all winter, attains to perfume, but not to honey.
The first honey is perhaps obtained from the flowers of the red maple
and the golden willow. The latter sends forth a wild, delicious perfume.
The sugar maple blooms a little later, and from its silken tassels
a rich nectar is gathered. My bees will not label these different
varieties for me as I really wish they would. Honey from the maples, a
tree so clean and wholesome, and full of such virtues every way, would
be something to put one's tongue to. Or that from the blossoms of the
apple, the peach, the cherry, the quince, the currant,--one would like
a card of each of these varieties to note their peculiar qualities. The
apple-blossom is very important to the bees. A single swarm has been
known to gain twenty pounds in weight during its continuance. Bees love
the ripened fruit, too, and in August and September will suck themselves
tipsy upon varieties such as the sops-of-wine.
The interval between the blooming of the fruit-trees and that of the
clover and the raspberry is bridged over in many localities by the honey
locust. What a delightful summer murmur these trees send forth at this
season. I know nothing about the quality of the honey, but it ought to
keep well. But when the red raspberry blooms, the fountains of plenty
are unsealed indeed; what a commotion about the hives then, especially
in localities where it is extensively cultivated, as in places along the
Hudson. The delicate white clover, which begins to bloom about the
same time, is neglected; even honey itself is passed by for this modest
colorless, all but odorless flower. A field of these berries in June
sends forth a continuous murmur like that of an enormous hive. The honey
is not so white as that obtained from clover but it is easier gathered;
it is in shallow cups while that of the clover is in deep tubes. The
bees are up and at it before sunrise, and it takes a brisk shower to
drive them in. But the clover blooms later and blooms everywhere, and
is the staple source of supply of the finest quality of honey. The
red clover yields up its stores only to the longer proboscis of the
bumble-bee, else the bee pasturage of our agricultural districts would
be unequaled. I do not know from what the famous honey of Chamouni
in the Alps is made, but it can hardly surpass our best products. The
snow-white honey of Anatolia in Asiatic Turkey, which is regularly sent
to Constantinople for the use of the grand seignior and the ladies of
his seraglio, is obtained from the cotton plant, which makes me think
that the white clover does not flourish these. The white clover is
indigenous with us; its seeds seem latent in the ground, and the
application of certain stimulants to the soil, such as wood ashes,
causes them to germinate and spring up.
The rose, with all its beauty and perfume, yields no honey to the bee,
unless the wild species be sought by the bumble-bee.
Among the humbler plants, let me not forget the dandelion that so
early dots the sunny slopes, and upon which the bee languidly grazes,
wallowing to his knees in the golden but not over-succulent pasturage.
From the blooming rye and wheat the bee gathers pollen, also from
the obscure blossoms of Indian corn. Among weeds, catnip is the great
favorite. It lasts nearly the whole season and yields richly. It could
no doubt be profitably cultivated in some localities, and catnip honey
would be a novelty in the market. It would probably partake of the
aromatic properties of the plant from which it was derived.
Among your stores of honey gathered before midsummer, you may chance
upon a card, or mayhap only a square inch or two of comb, in which the
liquid is as transparent as water, of a delicious quality, with a slight
flavor of mint. This is the product of the linden or basswood, of all
the trees in our forest the one most beloved by the bees. Melissa, the
goddess of honey, has placed her seal upon this tree. The wild swarms
in the woods frequently reap a choice harvest from it. I have seen
a mountain side thickly studded with it, its straight, tall, smooth,
light-gray shaft carrying its deep-green crown far aloft, like the
tulip-tree or the maple.
In some of the Northwestern States there are large forests of it, and
the amount of honey reported stored by strong swarms in this section
during the time the tree is in bloom is quite incredible. As a shade and
ornamental tree the linden is fully equal to the maple, and if it were
as extensively planted and cared for, our supplies of virgin honey would
be greatly increased. The famous honey of Lithuania in Russia is the
product of the linden.
It is a homely old stanza current among bee folk that--
"A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
But a swarm in July
Is not worth a fly."
A swarm in May is indeed a treasure; it is, like an April baby, sure
to thrive, and will very likely itself send out a swarm a month or
two later; but a swarm in July is not to be despised; it will store no
clover or linden honey for the "grand seignior and the ladies of his
seraglio," but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man's nectar, the
sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the
black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in
it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when at
a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake. Bread
with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good fortune. It is
not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the same class of goods
as Herrick's
"Nut-brown mirth and russet wit."
How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the blooming
plant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight the
apiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.
Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attracts
the bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or to
heliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon.
In September they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enough
sweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. The purple
asters and the golden-rod are about all that remain to them.
Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a great
advantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been the
custom from the earliest times in the Old World. Some enterprising
person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyptians, who had
floating apiaries on the Nile, has tried the experiment of floating
several hundred colonies north on the Mississippi, starting from New
Orleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort of
perpetual May or June, the chief attraction being the blossoms of the
river willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. Some of the bees
were no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured must
have been very great. In September they should have begun the return
trip, following the retreating summer South.