Locusts and Wild Honey | Page 6

bees began to buzz excitedly and to rush
about in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and all
returned to the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it
the queen with three or four other bees. She had been one of the first to
fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it upon her. I
conveyed her tenderly back to the hive, but either the accident
terminated fatally with her, or else the young queen had been liberated
in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it was ten days
before the swarm issued a second time.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the

woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and
incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature and
take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated. Years
upon years of life in the apiary seem to have no appreciable effect
towards their final, permanent domestication. That every new swarm
contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact that
they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an
enterprise, and that a passing cloud, or a sudden wind, after the bees are
in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive. Or an
attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water, will
quickly cause them to change their plans. I would not even say but that,
when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, now
entirely discredited by regular bee keepers but still resorted to by
unscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and creating
an uproar generally, might not be without good results. Certainly not by
drowning the "orders" of the queen, but by impressing the bees, as with
some unusual commotion in nature. Bees are easily alarmed and
disconcerted, and I have known runaway swarms to be brought down
by a farmer plowing in the field who showered them with handfuls of
loose soil.
I love to see a swarm go off--if it is not mine, and, if mine must go, I
want to be on hand to see the fun. It is a return to first principles again
by a very direct route. The past season I witnessed two such escapes.
One swarm had come out the day before, and, without alighting, had
returned to the parent hive,--some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or may be
the queen had found her wings too weak. The next day they came out
again and were hived. But something offended them, or else the tree in
the woods--perhaps some royal old maple or birch, holding its head
high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers and
galleries--had too many attractions; for they were presently discovered
filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around. Gradually
they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and they had
become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a more
compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex of
bees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as a
pivot,--over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heart

of the mountain, about a mile distant, --slow at first, so that the youth
who gave chase kept up with them, but increasing their speed till only a
foxhound could have kept them in sight. I saw their pursuer laboring up
the side of the mountain; saw his white shirtsleeves gleam as he entered
the woods; but he returned a few hours afterward without any clue as to
the particular tree in which they had taken refuge out of the ten
thousand that covered the side of the mountain.
The other swarm came out about one o'clock of a hot July day, and at
once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw
neither dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep side-hill.
Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle of
nearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them up
this hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of wind at least;
for it soon became evident that their course lay in this direction.
Determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase, I threw off my
coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly organized and
under way. The route soon led me into a field of standing rye, every
spear of