Bill did not know why he should run after the bee, but he followed through grass and weeds until he tumbled over a hidden log.
Barker laughed when Bill picked himself out of the weeds.
“That’s fine,” he commented. “My eyes are getting a little dull on such small creatures and I can’t run as fast as I once could, so I took you along to do the spying and the running. You see, we know now that this bee goes east from here to reach its home.”
The two hunters now walked a few hundred yards in the same direction and then caught another bee. Again Bill saw the liberated insect make a straight line eastward.
In this manner, they proceeded until they came close to the bluffs on the Wisconsin side.
“We’re on their line, all right,” Barker expressed himself gleefully. “If it doesn’t end at some settler’s bee-hive, we ought to find our bee-tree pretty soon.”
The next bee surprised Bill by going directly west; but the trapper clapped his hands and called: “We’ve passed the tree, so we’ll just work back carefully and watch for a good-looking hollow tree. If we can’t find it, we shall have to run a cross-line, which is sure to find it.”
But they found the wild bees, at the next trial, without running a cross-line. “Here they are, here they are!” Bill called, as he stood under a big white-oak.
Hundreds of black bees were entering and leaving a knot-hole about six feet above the ground.
“It’s a big swarm,” Barker told the boy; “and they are in a good place for us. Sometimes they go into a hollow limb thirty feet high, where you can’t get at them.