The Bee Hunter

by GEORGE HAROLD EDGELL

1

BEE hunting is rapidly becoming a lost art. My interest in the sport began at the age of ten when I was initiated by an old Adirondacker who had sunk to driving my grandfather’s mules in Newport, New Hampshire. George Smith was a character as fabulous as Paul Banyan. He took his whiskey neat; he smoked and chewed at the same time and could spit without removing the pipe from his mouth. His profanity could take the bluing off a gun barrel. Withal, he was one of the kindest and most generous of men and a mighty bee hunter before the Lord. He introduced me to the simple equipment necessary, and though I have improved it slighlly through the years, the fundamentals remain the same.

The most important item is the bee box, which you can make yourself. The box should be of wood and should measure about five or six inches long, three inches wide, and three inches deep. The wood of a cigar box is an excellent material, but the box should be left outdoors some time to weather, since bees do not like the odor of tobacco. The box should be divided into two square compartments, the front one with a hinged lid. In the lid there should be a small glass window which can be darkened by a wooden slide.

Between the front and rear compartments there should be an opening at the bottom, two thirds of an inch square, which can be opened and closed by a wooden slide manipulated from the outside. The back of the rear compartment should be of glass, covered with a wooden slide which can be raised on occasion to admit light to the compartment. The box should be tightly constructed, and shellacked after completion; it must also be lightproof. Remember, it will be out in all sorts of went her; and the older it is and the more weathered it becomes, the better the bees will like it.

In addition to the box, you need a couple of pieces of empty honeycomb cut square to drop easily into the front compartment. The best is old, black comb from an old bee tree, but any empty comb will do. For nectar, it is not necessary to use real honey. A syrup of one third white sugar and two thirds water boiled logether for fifteen minutes and then cooled seems to be as templing to bees as real honey. If you keep it so long that it begins to ferment, don’t worry. The bee’s taste is not nice in such mailers.

If used sparingly, oil of anise will attract bees, and the faint odor on a bee’s foot will attract others. The cork of the anise bottle, rubbed on the honeycomb and the comb then licked with the tongue, will provide all the anise you need. More will make the bees drunk; they will refuse to suck but will buzz around looking for the anise and eventually retire to the flowers to sober up.

To fill the comb, a common eyedropper is very handy. It is handy, too, to have a stand made of an upright piece of wood such as a four-foot section of a rake handle with a flat board nailed on top and the lower cud sharpened so that it can easily be thrust in the ground. Finally, it would be well to have a cloth bag or knapsack in which to carry the smaller articles, thus leaving your hands free.

The paraphernalia is, therefore, very simple, and a good bee hunter can get along, if necessary, with less. George Smith and I once started a line using an empty .32 caliber cartridge box and a bit of comb stolen dangerously from a nest of paper wasps.

Bees begin to work as soon as spring gets warm, and continue until severe frost. They are hard to find except during some definite honey flow such as the white clover or milkweed or goldenrod season. The last two are especially favorable. On the bee box I have used for a good many years, I have scribbled the dates of the findings of fifty-six bee trees. Eighty per cent are in July or September. Only occasionally did a finding occur in June or August, and practically never in October. July and September mean milkweed and goldenrod to the bee hunter.

Let us assume that it is a warm day in mid-July and the milkweed is in bloom. You find a patch teeming with honeybees. Your first task is to catch a bee. This is done by bringing the box up sharply under him, as he sits on the edge of a bloom, and slapping the lid home as he tumbles into the box. It is not so hard as it sounds, especially if the bee is on a high bloom of milkweed or goldenrod.

Having caught the bee in the front compartment, cover the window to darken the compartment; then open the slide to admit him to the rear and uncover the rear window. Seeing the light, the bee will promptly go in there, seeking escape. Then you can close the rear compartment and open the front to catch another bee. You can start a line with one bee, but the chance of success is greater if you have a dozen: during a good honey flow, if the tree is not too far away, these can be caught in ten minutes.

Provided with a dozen bees, you are ready to start the line. Fill one of the pieces of honeycomb with syrup and put it in the front compartment. Open the door between the two compartments and admit three or four bees to the port with the comb. They will come if you uncover the window in front and darken the rear. Then put the box down gently, darken it, put your hat over it, and leave it for three or four minutes. Meanwhile, fill the other comb. After three or four minutes, place the box on the stand and gently open the lid. If conditions are right, the bees will have found the syrup and taken a load in the darkness. Sometimes one or two will not have finished loading and will sit quietly until they are stuffed to capacity. If they are loaded, they will fly comparatively slowly as they take off to return to the hive. When they have left, repeat the whole process and let out more bees until all have gone. You are now in the stage of starting to establish the line.

When a bee leaves for the first time, he is both suspicious and anxious to establish the position of the stand. He leaves in slowly expanding spirals and figure eights. It is not until a bee has come and gone eight or ten times that he becomes familiar with the stand, loses his suspicions, and on taking off goes in approximately the direction of the tree, thus at last creating a “beeline.”

If conditions are right, of your dozen bees four or five will return for a second load. Again if conditions are right, in an hour or two these will communicate in some mysterious way with other workers in the hive that there is free lunch obtainable, and the number of bees on the line will increase. At best I have had a hundred or more bees running my line half an hour after the first bee left. Sometimes no bee will come back at all. Sometimes the original bees will go back and forth but bring no companions. Often the bees will refuse to suck, and will return to the flowers. When that happens, you had best pack up and go home and wait for more propitious conditions. The most important quality for a successful bee hunter is patience.

2

THE behavior of the returning bee is very different from that of the departing one. He dashes in circles around the stand, darts away again across the field until you think he will not return, whizzes back to circle the stand again, and finally, in narrowing circles, poises above the comb like a helicopter, his buzz still shrilling. This is one of the most exciting moments in the hunt. You wait with bated breath. The buzz ceases. The bee has come to rest and is loading. The line is started.

Soon others arrive, and the firstcomer departs. Once more you try to take his line, but once more he fools you as he leaves in widening circles. However, you have 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 it good light the eye can follow one for fifty or a hundred yards. Thus you establish your beeline.

It is never exact, however. No two bees have precisely the same idea as to the best way home. If, for example, there is a large tree in the direction of the hive perhaps a hundred yards from the stand, one bee may by-pass it to the right, another to the left, and a third may lift and go over it. You are constantly revising vour decision as to the true line.

By now you are ready to time a bee and see how long ho is gone. This will give 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 where he will 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 time I have had a bee absent and still been 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 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.

To time a bee, it is necessary to be able to identify an individual. To your equipment as already described, add a small boltle of water, a tiny earners-hair brush, and a piece of carpenter’s blue 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 would be hard to find again.) On the chalk dust, with the brush, drop a few drops of water and stir till the water is 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, but a good hunter can guess which bee is apt to be reasonably phlegmatic. One that is loading from a halfempty cell, with his shoulders buried and tail raised, can be painted without disturbing him.

Once he is 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. You now have an identifiable bee and can time him to get some idea of the distance of the tree from the stand.

3

THE next step is to move the stand. You might ask why, knowing the direction and the approximate distance, you do not hunt for the tree immediately. The answer is that there are ten thousand trees in the woods and only one of them is the bee tree. You can never be sure of the exact line or distance. Even when you have narrowed the problem to an area a hundred yards square, it is sometimes hard to find the tree. So once more the bee box is placed on the stand, a loaded comb is dropped into the front compartment, and the lid is left open. The spare comb should be hidden carefully.

When the bees return, they become suspicious and do not want 1o enter the box. As more arrive, the air is filled with disgusted humming. But eventually the temptation is too great, and one after another the bees drop 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 are 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 while you hear the welcome hum of the first returning bee, quickly followed by a second and a third. Success seems assured.

Theoretically it is. All you have to do is to continue to move the bees until the tree is reached or passed, in which case the fine 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.

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 you move 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 you get nearer to the tree, the bees tumble out in greater numbers until there are literally hundreds buzzing about and going back and forth, and you have 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 he is tending the stand. I ran make the statement categorically: there is 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 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. You can even imprison a bee in your cupped hands and he will not sting you if you do not squeeze him. On one occasion I 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. 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 may lose his head and try to slap a bee he thinks is dangerously near his face. If he does, he may be stung.

4

ABEE 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 color of the bees. Light-colored 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. Once we were running a line of light-colored bees that pitched high, and I told Smith we had belter 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.

The greatest thrill of the hunt comes when you find the tree. Sometimes you come upon it abruptly, if the hole is in an unshaded limb or bole in plain view. More often it is where you have to maneuver to see it, and the first warning comes when you see the flash of wings in the air and, in an agony of hope and doubt, move about until the hole can be seen and the presence of the swarm verified.

Even when the tree is known to be between two stands, finding 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 bole was big enough to hold bees, so we had passed it unsuspectingly. 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 commonest and most foolish question I am asked is how long it takes to find a bee tree. According to my experience, it takes somewhere between forty-three minutes and two years. I have already told how I once set up a stand accidentally within sight of the tree, which we found in less than 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 up. The following summer we struck the same line and hunted 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 determined 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. Il was below me, and I scrambled down the sleep 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. You could have passed within ten feet and not known that there was anything there that could harbor a colony of bees. We had our tree, but it had taken a little over two years to find it.

I have been fortunate in that the bulk of my hunting has been within the preserve of the Blue Mountain Forest Association in Sullivan County, New Hampshire. There, if you start a line of bees, you can be sure it is a wild swarm, since no farms with domestic bees are 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 back yard with the revelation that a hard day’s work has done no more than adulterale his honey with a half pint of sugar syrup.

The amount of honey you get from a bee tree varies enormously. My record is ninety-seven pounds of unstrained honey from one tree. It was not a large tree but had a large hollow. On the other hand, you 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 out fit 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. As an average, you can expect eighteen to twenty pounds of strained honey from a tree.

5

A WORD or two about the taking up of a bee tree may not be amiss. It brings us face to face with one unpleasant fact: the cruelty of the performance. For, once a tree is taken up, the bees soon die. If it is done in the autumn, the cold soon kills the bees. They have labored hard and are pitilessly robbed not only of the fruits of their labor but of their very lives. They have been friendly during the running and you have acquired an affection for them. How then can you bring yourself to destroy them?

I can give a reason, though I do not maintain that it is an excuse. Bees are perhaps the most thoroughly communistic creatures extant. The individual counts for nothing. The spirit of the hive is all. I am told that the life of a working bee during a heavy honey flow is only six or eight weeks. The workers work themselves until they shortly die; the hive is kept alive by the steady hatching of larvae who in turn carry on the work and die. The queen, who alone of the colony lives several years, has one nuptial flight and spends the rest of her life crawling over the comb and dropping an egg into each cell. Though she, more than anything else, is responsible for the spirit of the hive, she is more of a slave than her workers. As autumnal cold descends, work slops, and the bees torpidly cling together for warmth and maintain existence by consuming their store of honey.

In the spring, work and laying start, and the worn workers live jusl long enough to see the process started once more and enough larvae hatched to replace them and assure the continued existence of the hive. A bee will do anything for the hive, nothing for a fellow bee. A bee from a strange swarm, alighting on the comb, will be inslanlly attacked. On the other hand, if you try the experiment of killing a bee on the comb, pinning him with the blade of a knife, he will set up a screaming buzz that sounds horribly anguished even to the human car — and his fellow worker, loading a half an inch away, will pay no attention to him. When a tree is taken up, the spirit of the hive is killed then and there. The queen is usually crushed or lost. For the individual, the hunter has merely hastened dissolution by a little. He has killed the hive with the crash of the tree.

To take up a tree, you will need a couple of axes, a crosscut saw, a sledge, and at least three stout steel wedges. Plenty of twine is essential. Take as many bee nets as necessary. These can be made extemporaneously out of black mosquito netting, but it is safer to get the regular professional beekeeper’s veils. For every participant there should be a stout pair of linesman’s gauntlets. Wear old clothes, dungarees or old riding trousers. You are sure to get pretty well smeared with honey before you are done. Select a clear day. If any water finds its way into the honey, it might as well be thrown away. It will surely ferment and spoil.

You will need help — one or, better yet, two good woodsmen. Lastly, bring a large iron spoon, a couple of table knives, and plenty of receptacles for the honey. The humiliation of returning wilh a few pounds of comb in a wash boiler is nothing, compared with the exasperation of filling a couple of buckets and finding you have no way of transporting the rest of the honey in the tree.

The woodsmen put on their nets and gloves and fell the tree. Then they cut deep scarfs above and below the area where the honey is supposed to be. When rotten wood or honey shows on the blade, you can be sure the hollow is entered. Then a wedge is placed at the base of one of the scarfs and driven home with the sledge. Another, parallel to it, is driven in further down and a third parallel at the lower scarf. As the wedges are driven home, the bole will split, and a great section may be lifted off like a lid, exposing the honey and the bees.

Of course, I am describing an ideal performance. Often the tree makes trouble — has to be sawed several times and the opening enlarged with the axe. As the crack widens under the impact of the wedges, the bees pour out and the fight is on. They will attack viciously, and you are aware of the ping of bees dashing themselves against the wire netting of the veil. If you have taken proper precautions, you are safe, though-to be honest — you usually get stung once or twice in taking up the tree.

Once the fight is on, it is well to get at the honey as soon as possible. When the comb is well broken, the bees lose most of their fight. They will dash around in a bewildered way, bunch up on a bush, gorge themselves with spilled honey, and generally give evidence that the spirit of the hive is dead.

Bee hunting combines almost everything that is desirable in a sport. It is played out of doors. It requires exercise both of the muscles and ihe brain. It is a sport of brawn and of craft. It can be played alone. Moreover, it can be played at any tempo. Time was when I could scramble up and down Croydon Mountain like a squirrel and could push the pace. That I can no longer do, but I move more slowly, consider more carefully, draw on the craft and know ledge of long experience, and find as many trees as when I was young and impetuous. The sport is one of infinite variety, of suspense, disappointment, perseverance, and triumph. Your ostensible object is honey. It is the least of your rewards. The reward is when, after hours or days of trial and error, your eye catches the flash of wings in the tree and you are able to say “Checkmate” in one of the most difficult, complicated, and fascinating games in the world.