The Bee Hunter

by George Harold Edgell

WATCHING THE BEES LEAVE THE COMB
The general direction of the bees’ flight has been established, and the
hunter has taken up a position a few feet from the stand (arrow) from
which he can easily follow the path of the bees in the air

By now we are ready to time a bee and see how long he is gone. This will give one 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 to 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 I remember having a bee absent and still being 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 at 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.

In order to time a bee it is necessary to be able to identify an individual. George Smith used to do this by extracting some seed or pollen from the bud of a small mossy plant and sprinkling a little of the green dust on the back of a bee. At best it was an uncertain process as the dust was liable to be blown off before the bee’s return, and even if not, was hard to see. I have evolved a simpler and better system. To our equipment as already described, let us add a small bottle of water, a tiny camel’s hair brush, and a piece of blue carpenter’s 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 should be hard to find again. On the chalk dust, with the brush, drop a few drops of water and stir till the water is coloured 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. A good hunter can guess which bee is apt to be unreasonably phlegmatic and, especially if one is loading from a half empty cell, with the shoulders buried and his tail raised, he can be painted without disturbing him. Once 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. We now have an identifiable bee and can time him.

Let us suppose he takes seven or eight minutes a trip to the tree and back. One should time him two or three times to be accurate and not be disturbed if the time varies a little. We now have a bee line and some idea of the distance of the tree.

Now it is time to move. One might ask why, knowing the direction and the approximate distance, one does not immediately hunt for the tree. The answer is that there are ten thousand trees in the woods and only one the bee tree. One can never be sure of the exact line or, with any exactitude, the distance. Sometimes when one has narrowed the problem to an area of a hundred yards square, it is hard to find the tree. So once more the bee box is placed on the stand, a loaded comb dropped into the front compartment and the lid left open. The spare comb should be hidden carefully. Great ire on the part of the bees. They again become suspicious and do not want to enter the box. As more arrive, the air is filled with a disgusted humming. In time the temptation is too great and one after another a bee drops 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 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 time we hear the welcome hum of the first returning bee, quickly followed by a second and a third. The bees will stand moving. Success seems assured.

Theoretically it is. All one has to do is to continue to move the bees until the tree is reached or passed, in which case the line 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. In the first place, in order to reestablish a line, the stand should be set up in a clearing. We have now reached the woods and possibly no clearings are available. 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 one moves 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 the tree draws near, the bees tumble out in greater numbers until literally there are hundreds buzzing about and going back and forth, and one has 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 the hunter is tending the stand. The answer I can give categorically. There is absolutely 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 had 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. The fault was mine, not his. One can even imprison a bee in one’s cupped hands and he will crawl round and try to find his way out, but if you do not squeeze him, he will not think of stinging you. I once 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. One had to exercise caution. 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 lose his head and try to slap a bee that he thinks is dangerously near his face. If he does, he may be stung. He ought to be. It is worth repeating because to the newcomer it seems incredible. There is absolutely no danger of being stung while running a bee line.

As we draw nearer the tree, the moves are shorter and made more quickly. Now there is no worry about losing the line. Indeed, the bees not trapped will often follow the hunter on a short move and, as the imprisoned bees are released, others, arriving from behind, will drop on the comb. Now the hunter is convinced that the tree must be in sight. Usually it isn’t. As soon as it is established that the line still goes ahead, the hunter will go down the line, carefully examining every likely tree. This gives him exercise, puts in the time, and enables him to find a good place for the next stand if it is necessary to establish one. Usually it is. At last, however, one of two things happens. Either the hunter finds the tree or, after a move, the bees will be a long time coming back, or, if it is a long move, though it should not be, they may not come back at all. When bees have been running well and suddenly are slow to return, it is suspicious and auspicious. When the line is at last reestablished, the behaviour of the bees is odd. They will circle off in all directions in the most exasperating fashion. At last one or two will fly reasonably straight, and it dawns on the hunter that the line has reversed itself and the bees are going back. The tree is between this and the last stand. It is only a matter now of looking carefully enough to discover the tree.

Even then one cannot consider the battle won. A bee 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 colour of the bees. Light-coloured 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. One time we were running a line of light-coloured bees that pitched high, and I told Smith we had better look high up in maples. His reply was: