“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. It was this same Smith one time when we were fishing for trout and not finding them in one or two favoured holes, tried elsewhere in less likely places and found them, who said:
“If you want to catch fish, you’ve got to fish where the fish is, and if they ain’t there, you fish where they ain’t and there they’ll be.”
Of course, the greatest thrill of the hunt comes when one finds the tree. Sometimes it is abrupt, if the hole is in an unshaded limb or bole in plain view. More often it is in a position where one has to manoeuvre to see it, and the first warning comes when one sees the flash of wings in the air and, in an agony of hope and doubt, moves about until the hole can be seen and the presence of the swarm truly verified. Even when the tree is pinned between two stands, 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 hole was big enough to hold bees, so we had passed it unsuspecting. 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 BEE TREE
The bees have entered the hole indicated by the arrow in
an otherwise sound maple tree. Bees rarely choose a dead
tree in which to make their hive
The commonest and most foolish question I am asked is how long it takes to find a bee tree. According to my experience it is somewhere between forty-three minutes and two years. I have already mentioned the accident of setting up a stand within sight of the tree and finding it in less than an hour. Another time it was not an accident but a well calculated guess. In late September I was gunning in the Blue Mountain Forest area in New Hampshire. The day was unseasonably warm. I found no game, but observed a great many bees working the few goldenrod that were left and some late asters. I well knew the terrain. A little to the southwest was a small old sugar bush with large maples. To the northwest but still near was another somewhat larger. Beyond and in all directions had been pine forest that had recently been lumbered. There would be almost no chance for bees to set up in that area and therefore they must be in one of the two sugar groves. I went home, got my bee box and started a line near the small sugar bush. The line came quickly and I never moved. Following the line from the box, I found the bees in the third tree I examined. It took less than three quarters of 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 it up. The following summer we struck the same line and hunted it 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 decided 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. It was below me, and I scrambled down the steep 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. One could have passed within ten feet and not known that there was anything there that could harbour a colony of bees. We had our tree, but it had taken a little over two years to find it.
A word about cross lining. The literary experts seem always to find their quarry by cross lining. They catch a bee, release it, and take its line. Then they move a quarter of a mile, catch another and take its line. By triangulation, where the two lines meet, there will be the tree. Pas plus difficile que ça! Unfortunately, as we have seen, one cannot get even remotely an accurate line the first time a bee leaves. Moreover, if one could, there would be a good chance that bee number two came from another colony. One would get a line north and another northwest, and where they met, there would be the tree. Nevertheless, cross lining should not be ruled out. Sometimes one will get a line too weak to be worth following. Trying in another place one may get another weak line that seems to cross at a distance the first. If one goes to about where the two seem to meet, there is a good chance that one will be near a bee tree.
Let me illustrate with an amusing example. Three years ago I was bee hunting on the hills not far from my home in New Hampshire. I got a weak line nearly east and directly toward the little village of Croydon Flat. I decided that I must have got onto a tame swarm, though I could think of no one in Croydon Flat who kept bees. However, it was obviously time to try another area and I drove to the Flat and took a road northwest for a mile and a half, caught bees, and set up a stand. I got a weak line southeast, again directly toward Croydon Flat. I hunted up a friend who lived there, one Orrin Pillsbury, and he assured me that nobody in the Flat kept bees. The village is tiny, the intervale small, there is good hard wood timber near and no reason why a wild swarm should not have located near the village. I caught bees and set up in the vegetable garden back of Orrin’s house. I soon had a good line northeast, but it went over the house, and since some energetic bees flew over the house, others preferred to clear only the ell and still others went round, we had no accurate line. I moved across the village street to a field on the other side. The bees were a long time coming back and when they did, they established a line northwest. Here was a cross line with a vengeance. We investigated, thinking the bees were in one of the elms of the village street. I soon found them pouring in and out of a chimney on the house of one Cy Cummings. Cy had two chimneys and he only used one. The bees had set up in the other. That was one wild swarm I found that did me no good. Cy obligingly let us into the house, but when I suggested opening the disc in the second floor designed for the admission of a stove pipe, he mutinied. That was not unreasonable as I could not have got my head in to see, and the bees could have got out into the bedroom. Cy distrusts bees. I believe subsequently he built a fire in the chimney and brought down a mass of spoiled honey, dead bees, and melted wax. A great waste.