Part 2

Soon others arrive, and the first comer departs. Once more you try and take his line but once more he fools you as he leaves in widening circles. However, one has got the general direction and can take a position to see better. More information comes as each bee leaves. In an hour’s time the comb may have twenty bees on it at once and the arrivals and departures are frequent. Now the bees have begun to be accustomed to the stand and frequently jump off and fly straight so that in a good light the eye can follow one for fifty or a hundred yards. Thus you establish your “bee line.” It is never exact, however. No two bees have exactly the same idea as to the best way home. If, for example, there is a large tree in the direction of the hive and perhaps a hundred yards from the stand, one bee may bypass it to the right, another to the left, and a third may lift and go over it. One is constantly revising one’s decision as to the true line.

The general direction of the bees’ flight has been established, and the hunter has taken up a position a few feet from the stand (arrow) from which he can easily follow the path of the bees in the air]

By now we are ready to time a bee and see how long he is gone. This will give one a fair estimate of the distance from the stand to the tree. A bee takes between one and two minutes to load and as much time to unload. He may also have to crawl some distance in the tree to reach the place to deposit his load. He flies at about the speed of a human sprinter, say a quarter of a mile a minute. If he is gone eight minutes, the tree is not too far away. If he is gone twelve minutes, the hunter has a long job ahead. If he is gone four minutes, the tree is very close. The longest I remember having a bee absent and still being able to run a line and find the tree was fifteen minutes. The shortest was two and one-half minutes, and then the tree was actually in sight of the stand, though I did not know it at the time. Twenty minutes is hopeless. No bee will bring others back at that distance, and it is better to abandon the stand, move a mile or more in the direction the bee has taken, catch more bees, and repeat the whole process nearer the tree.

In order to time a bee it is necessary to be able to identify an individual. George Smith used to do this by extracting some seed or pollen from the bud of a small mossy plant and sprinkling a little of the green dust on the back of a bee. At best it was an uncertain process as the dust was liable to be blown off before the bee’s return, and even if not, was hard to see. I have evolved a simpler and better system. To our equipment as already described, let us add a small bottle of water, a tiny camel’s hair brush, and a piece of blue carpenter’s chalk. With the blade of a penknife, scrape some dust from the chalk onto the back of a smooth stone or the blade of a hand axe if you carry one. Incidentally a small scout’s axe is a handy thing to have for clearing brush, making stands, marking the bee tree when you have found it, and blazing a trail from it if it is deep in the woods and should be hard to find again. On the chalk dust, with the brush, drop a few drops of water and stir till the water is coloured blue. Then with the wet brush dab the rear of a loading bee. This must be done deftly and gently. Bees do not like to be painted. A good hunter can guess which bee is apt to be unreasonably phlegmatic and, especially if one is loading from a half empty cell, with the shoulders buried and his tail raised, he can be painted without disturbing him. Once daubed, the new decoration does not annoy him in the least and is not noticed by his fellows. When wet, the spot shows only slightly, but by the time the bee returns, the chalk dust will be dry and will stand out like a beacon so vivid that it can be spotted even before the bee alights. We now have an identifiable bee and can time him.

Let us suppose he takes seven or eight minutes a trip to the tree and back. One should time him two or three times to be accurate and not be disturbed if the time varies a little. We now have a bee line and some idea of the distance of the tree.

Now it is time to move. One might ask why, knowing the direction and the approximate distance, one does not immediately hunt for the tree. The answer is that there are ten thousand trees in the woods and only one the bee tree. One can never be sure of the exact line or, with any exactitude, the distance. Sometimes when one has narrowed the problem to an area of a hundred yards square, it is hard to find the tree. So once more the bee box is placed on the stand, a loaded comb dropped into the front compartment and the lid left open. The spare comb should be hidden carefully. Great ire on the part of the bees. They again become suspicious and do not want to enter the box. As more arrive, the air is filled with a disgusted humming. In time the temptation is too great and one after another a bee drops down to the comb. When ten or a dozen have done so, snap down the lid of the box and drive them into the rear compartment as before. They are reluctant to go, but a puff of cigarette smoke blown through a crack in the lid will send them scurrying to the rear in search of purer air. Close the slide, reopen the box, place it on the stand and catch another lot. Catch all you can. Then pull up the stand, gather up your paraphernalia and move three or four hundred yards down the line. Then set up the stand and release the bees in batches of eight or ten.

This is another critical moment. Will the bees stand moving? If you have mistaken the line and moved off it too far to the left or right, the bees may not come back, and you will have to return to the first stand and start over again. The same is true if the swarm is weak or the flowers too tempting. The time seems interminable. I have a theory, which I cannot prove, that on the first move the bees return to the first stand before investigating the possibilities of the second. Conditions are right on this day, however, and after a time we hear the welcome hum of the first returning bee, quickly followed by a second and a third. The bees will stand moving. Success seems assured.

Theoretically it is. All one has to do is to continue to move the bees until the tree is reached or passed, in which case the line reverses and proves that the tree is between the last and the next to the last stands. If it were as simple as that, bee hunting would not be the art and the fun that it is. In the first place, in order to reestablish a line, the stand should be set up in a clearing. We have now reached the woods and possibly no clearings are available. Released in the woods, a bee circles up into the trees and disappears. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether he goes forward or back. The moves have to be shorter. Often if one moves beyond the tree, the bees will not come back, and you have lost your line. Above all, the lining must be straight. If you meet a swamp, you must go through it. If you meet a cliff, you must go up it. If you meet a pond, you must go round it and set up at just the right point on the opposite side. All this takes time. You must be prepared to spend two or three days before finding the tree. Meanwhile, as the tree draws near, the bees tumble out in greater numbers until literally there are hundreds buzzing about and going back and forth, and one has to refill the comb frequently.

This brings up another point: the danger of being stung. The newcomer is apt to be terrified as the bees buzz round his head while the hunter is tending the stand. The answer I can give categorically. There is absolutely no danger whatever of being stung while running a line. The bees are entirely friendly. They will fight among themselves if two swarms are involved. They will fight a hornet if he has accidentally found the comb. The hunter who is supplying them with free syrup they would not think of molesting. The only possibility of getting stung is some careless accident. I was once stung when a friendly bee had lighted on my khaki shirt and, not noticing him, I put my arm down and squeezed him against my side. Naturally, he let drive at my ribs. The fault was mine, not his. One can even imprison a bee in one’s cupped hands and he will crawl round and try to find his way out, but if you do not squeeze him, he will not think of stinging you. I once was lining a swarm in the middle of the goldenrod honey flow when a terrific hailstorm came up and leveled all the flowers. The next day the bees were desperate. Their bee pasture was gone and they were mad for syrup. I soon had what seemed to be half the hive around me. They came not in hundreds, but in thousands. Even to an old hunter it was a little terrifying, but absolutely harmless. One had to exercise caution. Feeling a curious tickling on the left side of my breast, I discovered that some two dozen bees had found the anise bottle in my shirt pocket and had gone in to investigate. It was quite a job to get the anise bottle out and persuade the bees to come too, but I did it without accident. The only danger to the amateur is that he lose his head and try to slap a bee that he thinks is dangerously near his face. If he does, he may be stung. He ought to be. It is worth repeating because to the newcomer it seems incredible. There is absolutely no danger of being stung while running a bee line.

As we draw nearer the tree, the moves are shorter and made more quickly. Now there is no worry about losing the line. Indeed, the bees not trapped will often follow the hunter on a short move and, as the imprisoned bees are released, others, arriving from behind, will drop on the comb. Now the hunter is convinced that the tree must be in sight. Usually it isn’t. As soon as it is established that the line still goes ahead, the hunter will go down the line, carefully examining every likely tree. This gives him exercise, puts in the time, and enables him to find a good place for the next stand if it is necessary to establish one. Usually it is. At last, however, one of two things happens. Either the hunter finds the tree or, after a move, the bees will be a long time coming back, or, if it is a long move, though it should not be, they may not come back at all. When bees have been running well and suddenly are slow to return, it is suspicious and auspicious. When the line is at last reestablished, the behaviour of the bees is odd. They will circle off in all directions in the most exasperating fashion. At last one or two will fly reasonably straight, and it dawns on the hunter that the line has reversed itself and the bees are going back. The tree is between this and the last stand. It is only a matter now of looking carefully enough to discover the tree.

Even then one cannot consider the battle won. A bee tree can be extraordinarily hard to find. The likeliest trees are maples, beeches, and hemlocks, but the hunter must look everywhere. Smith used to have a theory that if the bees rose high as they left the stand, the hole was high in the air. If they pitched low, the hole was low. He also pretended to guess the kind of tree that the bees were in by the colour of the bees. Light-coloured bees were likely to be in a maple. Very dark ones might be in a dead pine. There is something in all this but not much. One time we were running a line of light-coloured bees that pitched high, and I told Smith we had better look high up in maples. His reply was:

“You look high in the maples and low in the cedars and up and down all trunks and branches, hard wood and soft, big enough to hold a hive and you can be sure of just one thing. When you do find them, they’ll be where you don’t expect them.”

A sound aphorism and worth following. It was this same Smith one time when we were fishing for trout and not finding them in one or two favoured holes, tried elsewhere in less likely places and found them, who said:

“If you want to catch fish, you’ve got to fish where the fish is, and if they ain’t there, you fish where they ain’t and there they’ll be.”

Of course, the greatest thrill of the hunt comes when one finds the tree. Sometimes it is abrupt, if the hole is in an unshaded limb or bole in plain view. More often it is in a position where one has to manoeuvre to see it, and the first warning comes when one sees the flash of wings in the air and, in an agony of hope and doubt, moves about until the hole can be seen and the presence of the swarm truly verified. Even when the tree is pinned between two stands, it may take a long time. I remember one tree that we had so pinned. I had with me my son, who is a good bee hunter, a companion of his, and a couple of rank amateurs. The five of us tramped the area between the two stands for an hour before I found the hive. It was in a smallish swamp maple that divided into two boles four feet above the ground. Neither hole was big enough to hold bees, so we had passed it unsuspecting. In the crotch where the boles divided was a hole and into this the bees were dropping, making their home in the short trunk near the ground. After we had found it we noted that we had actually trampled a path through the ferns within fifteen feet of the tree.

The bees have entered the hole indicated by the arrow in an otherwise sound maple tree. Bees rarely choose a dead tree in which to make their hive]

The commonest and most foolish question I am asked is how long it takes to find a bee tree. According to my experience it is somewhere between forty-three minutes and two years. I have already mentioned the accident of setting up a stand within sight of the tree and finding it in less than an hour. Another time it was not an accident but a well calculated guess. In late September I was gunning in the Blue Mountain Forest area in New Hampshire. The day was unseasonably warm. I found no game, but observed a great many bees working the few goldenrod that were left and some late asters. I well knew the terrain. A little to the southwest was a small old sugar bush with large maples. To the northwest but still near was another somewhat larger. Beyond and in all directions had been pine forest that had recently been lumbered. There would be almost no chance for bees to set up in that area and therefore they must be in one of the two sugar groves. I went home, got my bee box and started a line near the small sugar bush. The line came quickly and I never moved. Following the line from the box, I found the bees in the third tree I examined. It took less than three quarters of an hour.

Now for the other end of the scale. Years ago when I was still a boy, Smith and I started a line that ran up the steep slope of the southern-saddleback of Croydon Mountain. The timber was thick, the slope at times ladder-like, and the hunting difficult. We made several moves and then hunted for the tree. We could not find it and eventually gave it up. The following summer we struck the same line and hunted it again. Evidently the bees had wintered well, but still we could not find the tree. The next summer we got the same line. By that time our dander was up and we decided to find that tree. We ran a line as well as possible. Then we began to examine the timber horizontally back and forth across the line, blazing our paths to make sure that the whole area was covered. After a time, I heard a yell and considerable profanity accompanying it. It was below me, and I scrambled down the steep slope. The profanity seemed to come from a clump of young spruce out of which projected the old bole of a fallen maple. Smith had stepped on the bole, slipped, and shot through the young spruces ending with his legs on either side of the stump of the fallen tree. The bees were in that. One could have passed within ten feet and not known that there was anything there that could harbour a colony of bees. We had our tree, but it had taken a little over two years to find it.

A word about cross lining. The literary experts seem always to find their quarry by cross lining. They catch a bee, release it, and take its line. Then they move a quarter of a mile, catch another and take its line. By triangulation, where the two lines meet, there will be the tree. Pas plus difficile que ça! Unfortunately, as we have seen, one cannot get even remotely an accurate line the first time a bee leaves. Moreover, if one could, there would be a good chance that bee number two came from another colony. One would get a line north and another northwest, and where they met, there would be the tree. Nevertheless, cross lining should not be ruled out. Sometimes one will get a line too weak to be worth following. Trying in another place one may get another weak line that seems to cross at a distance the first. If one goes to about where the two seem to meet, there is a good chance that one will be near a bee tree.

Let me illustrate with an amusing example. Three years ago I was bee hunting on the hills not far from my home in New Hampshire. I got a weak line nearly east and directly toward the little village of Croydon Flat. I decided that I must have got onto a tame swarm, though I could think of no one in Croydon Flat who kept bees. However, it was obviously time to try another area and I drove to the Flat and took a road northwest for a mile and a half, caught bees, and set up a stand. I got a weak line southeast, again directly toward Croydon Flat. I hunted up a friend who lived there, one Orrin Pillsbury, and he assured me that nobody in the Flat kept bees. The village is tiny, the intervale small, there is good hard wood timber near and no reason why a wild swarm should not have located near the village. I caught bees and set up in the vegetable garden back of Orrin’s house. I soon had a good line northeast, but it went over the house, and since some energetic bees flew over the house, others preferred to clear only the ell and still others went round, we had no accurate line. I moved across the village street to a field on the other side. The bees were a long time coming back and when they did, they established a line northwest. Here was a cross line with a vengeance. We investigated, thinking the bees were in one of the elms of the village street. I soon found them pouring in and out of a chimney on the house of one Cy Cummings. Cy had two chimneys and he only used one. The bees had set up in the other. That was one wild swarm I found that did me no good. Cy obligingly let us into the house, but when I suggested opening the disc in the second floor designed for the admission of a stove pipe, he mutinied. That was not unreasonable as I could not have got my head in to see, and the bees could have got out into the bedroom. Cy distrusts bees. I believe subsequently he built a fire in the chimney and brought down a mass of spoiled honey, dead bees, and melted wax. A great waste.

This brings up another point. The writer has been fortunate in that the bulk of his hunting has been within the preserve of the Blue Mountain Forest Association in Sullivan County, New Hampshire. There, if one starts a line of bees, one can be sure it is a wild swarm. There are no farms with domestic bees in the area. Most hunters, however, have to hunt in country districts where there are farms, the owners of which may well keep bees. It will be wise, therefore, before going hunting, to ascertain the localities where tame bees are kept. Nothing is more frustrating than to start a line, get it going well, run it several moves, and end in a farmer’s backyard with the revelation that a hard day’s work has done no more than adulterate his honey with a half a pint of sugar syrup. This happened to me once, but it has not happened again. New Hampshire is largely wooded, and if a line heads for a deep woods on a mountain slope, one can be reasonably sure that one is trailing a wild swarm. Do not, however, let that prevent you from lining a wild swarm near a locality where there are tame bees. Many wild swarms are simply once removed from the domestic variety. Even a good apiarist often loses a colony when his bees swarm at an inconvenient time, and the new colony may set up quarters not far from the old. For years I refrained from starting a line from my own lawn because of the presence a mile and a quarter away of a number of colonies belonging to a gentleman known as Chicken Smith. Chicken Smith’s bees used my flowers regularly. Then one day I decided to start a line anyway just for interest and found a wild swarm in my own sugar bush.

One question often asked is how much honey one gets from a bee tree. The amount varies enormously. My record is ninety-seven pounds of unstrained honey from one tree. It was not a large tree, but it had a large hollow. It involved a terrific fight with the bees, as one would expect, and both my companion and I were rather well stung, but we filled a wash boiler with honey and then had to go home for more containers. On the other hand, one may take up a tree and get only a pound or two. I remember taking up an old rock maple. Its branches were so wide that when we cut it down, it merely leaned on its elbows and we had to cut it three times before we could get to the entrance to the hive. The wood was so heavy and the grain so gnarled that a steel wedge held against the wood and struck with a sledge, would bounce off. To get into the hollow was about as easy as cracking a safe, and it took three of us over three hours. Our reward was one piece of filled comb smaller than the palm of my hand. It is all a gamble and part of the fascination of the hunt. As an average, I should say one ought to expect to get eighteen to twenty pounds of strained honey from a tree.

As to the number of moves, that varies from no move at all, as we have seen, to a dozen or even more. The longest line I remember I started years ago in the clearing at the base of Croydon Mountain. The line took me up the steepest slope to the ridge just north of the summit. Thence it carried over the ridge and down the opposite side. When it came time to take up the tree, it was easier to come in from the north than from the south along the line I had followed. It took me three days, and I made fifteen moves. When bees are running well, one can leave them in the late afternoon and pick them up again next day. On leaving them, one fills every available piece of comb, weights the box with a stone so it will not be blown off in case of a sudden wind, and puts one piece of comb in the outer compartment with the lid propped up only half an inch so that in case of rain at least one comb will retain undiluted syrup. In spite of all this, when one returns next day, usually every piece of comb is empty and the bees gone. It is hard not to be discouraged, but there is no need to be. Fill the comb and wait. In five, ten, or twenty minutes a bee will come for one more look to see if a trifle of sweet may still be gleaned. He will load, depart, and in half an hour you will have a roaring line once more.

Bee hunting brings some odd experiences. As boys, my brother and I were bee hunting with Smith and found the bees in the base of a rock maple on the edge of the woods, in a fissure not five feet from the ground. It was late September and we decided to take up the tree forthwith. It was not necessary to fell the tree, but merely to cut into the hollow to get the honey. We had, however, no nets or gloves, so we built a smudge to drive back and stupefy the bees while we were getting the honey. We made a good haul and drove back to camp three miles away that evening and had ourselves a Gargantuan meal of brook trout, flapjacks, and new honey. After supper we went out to listen to the bugling of the elk with which the preserve was stocked and, looking across the valley, we saw a bright light. Our smudge had set fire to the tree. We drove back and found the hollow interior a furnace. There was no water available, and the fire had burned high up in the hollow. We had no means to extinguish it, nor did we dare leave it for fear the tree would fall and the fire spread. The elk were bugling merrily, and in those days an old bull in the rutting season was quite capable of attacking a man. We finally climbed onto a large branch of the nearest maple and spent a restless night telling stories and waiting for the fire to burn itself out. Fortunately, by morning it had.

Sometimes the attempt to find a tree is unusually baffling. One time my son and I lined and cross lined a swarm until we narrowed the search to two or three trees. The likeliest was a beech, but though we occasionally got a glitter of wings in the air, we could not be sure that we had the tree. It was not until we had gone home and returned with a powerful pair of field glasses that we were able to distinguish the bees in the foliage forty-five feet in the air and near enough the hole to make us certain that we had our bee tree. The actual hole itself we did not see until we felled the tree and took up the swarm. Another time I had run the line to the top of a mountain and then the line reversed itself. Between the two last stands there was nothing but bull spruce not big enough to hold a colony, and moreover I had never heard of bees in a spruce. Tree by tree I examined the terrain. I finally found the bees dropping down into the roots of a spruce where there was a hollow partly in the wood and partly in the ground where the colony had settled. It was a miserable little swarm, and I never bothered to take it up. The next summer it was gone, as I had expected in the case of a foolish swarm that had selected so unsuitable an habitation.

Does one ever find a bee tree by accident? Yes, but very, very rarely. I once was eating my luncheon beside a mountain brook and noticed a honey bee loading water at a wet spot. He flew off and soon came back. I got out my watch and timed him. He was gone two minutes. I rose and went in the direction of his departure and found the tree fifty yards away. This was without benefit of bee box or syrup, but did involve lining of a sort. On the other hand, I once found a tree on top of a mountain and, choosing a different way down, found another bee tree two hundred yards from the first. My guess is that the older colony had swarmed, and the new commune had decided to set up in the nearest suitable place to the old. Another tree I found accidentally due to an amusing mistake. My companion had had some experience in bee hunting, and when I started out to catch some bees I asked her to fill the comb for me so as to be ready when I returned with the bees. She did so, however filling the comb from the anise bottle instead of the syrup bottle. There was nothing for it but to go all the way home for fresh comb and start over again. On the way back we discovered a large colony of bees in a huge pine which we had passed unnoticed as we had gone out the first time. These are the only trees I remember having discovered by accident, and I have looked longingly into thousands of likely trees. To find bees one must hunt them and not rely on chance.

Sometimes bees, for such sagacious insects, show remarkably little sense in the abode they select. I once found a colony in a small dead poplar (or popple I should prefer to call it) so weak and rotted that I could have pushed it over with my weight. Those bees I decided to save for pets. My wife, the farmer, and I drove that night to a place a few hundred yards from the tree. The hole was about five feet up. The family was all at home of course, and I plugged the hole with moss to keep them there. Then we attached a rope to the tree as far up as we could reach and sawed it off at the base, lowering it gently to the ground. Then we cut off the top above the hollow which sheltered the bees. The farmer and I easily carried it to the buckboard and brought it home in triumph. I had already prepared a place for it in a tub sunk in the ground and cement ready to puddle around it. Soon our bee tree was standing erect in the cow pasture near the house with a saucepan over the top to keep rain from seeping into the hollow. I unplugged the hole and went to bed. Next morning I went out to see how my guests did. They were six miles from where they had gone to bed the night before and were quite untroubled by it. They had already organized perfectly. The temperature of the hive apparently had risen, and a ring of fanners was around the hole fanning air into the interior with their wings where it was caught up by other fanners and driven through the hive. The ventilation system was humming. The bees had already discovered the small brook a few yards away, and a bucket brigade was busily fetching water. The bulk of the workers had discovered my neighbor’s buckwheat patch and were busily gathering nectar. I kept them for several years and got much fun from watching them, nor did they ever show the slightest resentment toward me for shifting their home. Eventually they died in an unusually severe winter.

Apropos of starting a line without catching a bee, it can be done but only by the rarest accident. I did it once. I had gone out to hunt after the autumnal frosts, hoping to find a late flower or two on which I could catch a bee. I went to a sheltered clearing and, leaving my spare box open with the empty comb exposed on a boulder, I wandered round the clearing searching for a bee. Finding none after fifteen or twenty minutes, I returned to gather up my kit and found a bee buzzing round the empty comb. He had found it by accident, having flown near enough to get a scent of the comb and anise. I succeeded in filling the dropper with syrup and squirting it onto the comb without frightening the bee. He found the syrup promptly, loaded, and left. I then filled the comb properly. I had hardly finished when the bee returned with three friends. In fifteen minutes I had a roaring line, and in three moves and about two hours I found the tree. This was a good example of how well bees will run on a warm fall day after the flowers have gone by. It is also the only example I remember of my being fortunate enough to start a line in this way.