Jonathan had taken me to see the "bee tree" down in the "old John Lane lot." Judging from the name, the spot must have been a clearing at one time, but now it is one of the oldest pieces of woodland in the locality. The bee tree, a huge chestnut, cut down thirty years ago for its store of honey, is sinking back into the forest floor, but we could still see its hollow heart and charred sides where the fire had been made to smoke out the bees.
"Jonathan," I said, "I\'d like to find some wild honey. It sounds so good."
"No better than tame honey," said Jonathan.
"It sounds better. I\'m sure it would be different scooped out of a tree like this than done up neatly in pound squares."
"Tastes just the same," persisted Jonathan prosaically.[Pg 156]
"Well, anyway, I want to find a bee tree. Let\'s go bee-hunting!"
"What\'s the use? You don\'t know a honeybee from a bumblebee."
"Well, you do, of course," I answered, tactfully.
Jonathan, mollified, became gracious. "I never went bee-hunting, but I\'ve heard the old fellows tell how it\'s done. But it takes all day."
"So much the better," I said.
And that night I looked through our books to find out what I could about bees. Over the fireplace in what was once the "best parlor" is a long, low cupboard with glass doors. Here Bibles, albums, and a few other books have always been stored, and from this I pulled down a fat, gilt-lettered volume called "The Household Friend." This book has something to say about almost everything, and, sure enough, it had an article on bees. But the Household Friend had obviously never gone bee-hunting, and the only real information I got was that bees had four wings and six legs.
"So has a fly," said Jonathan, when I came to him with this nugget of wisdom.[Pg 157]
The neighbors gave suggestions. "You want to go when the yeller-top\'s in bloom," said one.
"Yellow-top?" I questioned, stupidly enough.
"Yes. Yeller-top—\'t\'s in bloom now," with a comprehensive wave of the hand.
"Oh, you mean goldenrod!"
"Well, I guess you call it that. Yeller-top we call it. You find one o\' them old back fields where the yeller-top\'s come in, \'n\' you\'ll see bees \'nough."
Another friend told us that when we had caught our bee we must drop honey on her back. This would send her to the hive to get her friends to groom her off, and they would all return with her to see where the honey came from. This sounded improbable, but we were in no position to criticize our information.
As to the main points of procedure all our advisers agreed. We were to put honey in an open box, catch a bee in it, and when she had loaded up with honey, let her go, watch her flight and locate the direction of her home. When she returned with friends for more[Pg 158] honey, we were to shut them in, carry the box on in the line of flight, and let them go again. We were to keep this up until we reached the bee tree. It sounded simple.
We got our box—two boxes, to be sure of our resources—baited them with chunks of comb, and took along little window panes for covers. Then we packed up luncheon and set out for an abandoned pasture in our woods where we remembered the "yeller-top" grew thick. Our New England fall mornings are cool, and as we walked up the shady wood road Jonathan predicted that it would be no use to hunt bees. "They\'ll be so stiff they can\'t crawl. Look at that lizard, now!" He stooped and touched a little red newt lying among the pebbles of the roadway. The little fellow seemed dead, but when Jonathan held him in the hollow of his hand for a few moments he gradually thawed out, began to wriggle, and finally dropped through between his fingers and scampered under a stone. "See?" said Jonathan. "We\'ll have to thaw out every bee just that way."
But I had confidence that the sun would take the place of Jonathan\'s hand, and refused[Pg 159] to give up my hunt. From the main log-road we turned off into a path, once a well-trodden way to the old ox pastures, but now almost overgrown, and pushed on through brier and sweet-fern and huckleberry and young birch, down across a little brook, and up again to the "old Sharon lot," a long field framed in big woods and grown up to sumac and brambles and goldenrod. It was warmer here, in the steady sunshine, sheltered from the crisp wind by the tree walls around us, and we began to look about hopefully for bees. At first Jonathan\'s gloomy prognostications seemed justified—there was not a bee in sight. A few wasps were stirring, trailing their long legs as they flew. Then one or two "yellow jackets" appeared, and some black-and-white hornets. But as the field grew warmer it grew populous, bumblebees hummed, and finally some little soft brown bees arrived—surely the ones we wanted. Cautiously Jonathan approached one, held his box under the goldenrod clump, brought the glass down slowly from above—and the bee was ours. She was a gentle little thing, and did not seem to resent her treatment at all, but dropped[Pg 160] down on to the honeycomb and fell to work. Jonathan had providently cut a three-forked stick, and he now stuck this into the ground and set the box on the forks so that it was about on a level with the goldenrod tops. Then he carefully drew off the glass, and we sat down to watch.
"Shouldn\'t you think she must have had enough?" I said, after a while—"Oh! there she comes now!"
Our bee appeared on the edge of the box, staggering heavily. She rubbed her legs, rubbed her wings, shook herself, girded up her loins, as it were, and brushed the hair out of her eyes, and finally rose, turning on herself in a close spiral which widened into larger and larger circles above the box, and at length, after two or three wide sweeps where we nearly lost track of her, she darted off in a "bee-line" for a tall chestnut tree on a knoll to the westward.
"Will she come back?" we wondered. Five minutes—ten—fifteen—it seemed an hour.
"She must have been a drone," said Jonathan.[Pg 161]
"Or maybe she wasn\'t a honeybee at all," I suggested, gloomily. "She might be just another kind of hornet—no, look! There she is!"
I could hardly have been more thrilled if my fairy godmother had appeared on the goldenrod stalk and waved her wand at me. To think that the bee really did play the game! I knelt and peered in over the side of the box. Yes, there she was, all six feet in the honey, pumping away with might and main through her little red tongue, or proboscis, or whatever it was. We sank back among the weeds and waited for her to go. As she rose, in the same spirals, and disappeared westward, Jonathan said, "If she doesn\'t bring another one back with her this time, we\'ll try dropping honey on her back. You wait here and be a landmark for the bee while I try to catch another one in the other box."
I settled down comfortably under the yellow-top, and instantly I realized what a pleasant thing it is to be a landmark. For one thing, when you sit down in a field you get a very different point of view from that when you stand. Goldenrod is different looked at from beneath, with sky beyond it; sky is different[Pg 162] seen through waving masses of yellow. Moreover, when you sit still outdoors, the life of things comes to you; when you are moving yourself, it evades you. Down among the weeds where I sat, the sun was hot, but the breeze was cool, and it brought to me, now the scent of wild grapes from an old stone wall, now the spicy fragrance of little yellow apples on a gnarled old tree in the fence corner, now the sharp tang of the goldenrod itself. The air was full of the hum of bees, and soon I began to distinguish their different tones—the deep, rich drone of the bumblebees, the higher singsong of the honeybees, the snarl of the yellow-jacket, the jerky, nasal twang of the black-and-white hornet. They began to come close around me; two bumblebees hung on a frond of goldenrod so close to my face that I could see the pollen dust on their fur. Crickets and grasshoppers chirped and trilled beside me. All the little creatures seemed to have accepted me—all but one black-and-white hornet, who left his proper pursuits, whatever they may............