Locusts and Wild Honey | Page 7

stopped on one side of the valley or the other, or had indeed cleared the
opposite mountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was
entirely problematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the
honey-laden tree that some of these forests would hold before the
falling of the leaf.
I heard of a youth in the neighborhood more lucky than myself on a
like occasion. It seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm,
whose route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the summit,
hat in hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him.
Presently he noticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting
on his arm; and in almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the
whole swarm had followed the queen into his hat. Being near a stone
wall, he coolly deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself
from the accommodating bees, and returned for a hive. The explanation
of this singular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such
long and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very exhaustion. It is
not very unusual for swarms to be thus found in remote fields, collected
upon a bush or branch of a tree.
When a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual
bees, as I have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward,
like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind.
Unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or
fifteen feet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles,
except in crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high.

The swarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen
(at least at the outset) constantly going and coming. As they take a
direct course, there is always some chance of following them to the tree,
unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a wood or a
swamp or a high hill, intervenes,--enough chance, at any rate, to
stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as their wind
holds out. If the bees are successfully followed to their retreat, two
plans are feasible,--either to fell the tree at once, and seek to hive them,
perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree that contains the
cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite your neighbors and go
and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former course is
more business-like; but the latter is the one usually recommended by
one's friends and neighbors.
Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no one
is about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by some
distant laborers in the field, or by some youth plowing on the side of
the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the
swarm dimly whirling by overhead, and, maybe, gives chase; or he may
simply catch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees
nothing. When he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a
swarm of bees go over; and perhaps from beneath one of the hives in
the garden a black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.
They are not partial as to the kind of tree,--pine, hemlock, elm, birch,
maple, hickory,--any tree with a good cavity high up or low down. A
swarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them, and
took up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree across an
adjoining field. The entrance was a mouse-hole near the ground.
Another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper, and went
into the cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear
of a large mansion. But there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as
Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or more
probably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain.
In any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainous
districts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independence

forms quite a large per cent. In the Northern States these swarms very
often perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seem to
multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wild honey
is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed, not long since, that some
wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled a tree that
had several pailfuls in it.
One night on the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp
near the foot of a bee-tree, which next