He answered:
“Si Signore, ma Lei è il primo che l’ha mai osservato.”
I also found a lively swarm in the triforium of the ruined abbey of Jumièges in Normandy which antedated San Galgano by a hundred years. So it is possible to combine the discovering of wild bees with the study of the history of art.
Perhaps the tree I remember most vividly is the first one ever discovered unaided. When I hunted with Smith, he was invariably the one who first saw the bees. Since his death years ago, I have hunted with many people and only twice has my companion seen the bees before I did. There is something telepathic in the way an old hunter senses the nearness of bees, though even he is often fooled. In order to find a tree entirely on my own I had to escape from Smith’s tutelage. The great day came when I was about fifteen. I caught bees in front of my father’s house in Newport, N. H., and soon got a good line running straight up the side of Coit Mountain. There was a long upland pasture and beyond that the woods. Four moves took me to the forest edge and timing and numbers both told me the tree was near. I went up the line to look for the bees or for a clearing and soon found the swarm in a good-sized rock maple. I have received a number of great thrills in a long life, such as the notification that I had qualified for my doctorate, the reception in New York harbour in late December 1918 after the first World War, the citation from the President on receiving an honorary degree from Harvard, but, believe me, these thrills are all in class B as compared to the one I got when I first found a bee tree unaided.
The finding had an amusing sequel. The hole was about eight feet up the bole, too far to reach but near enough for the bees to be very conscious of an intruder. I started proudly to blaze my initials on the tree when I became conscious of a roar and the air seemed to grow dark above me. I turned and ran just in time, nor did I return to finish blazing the tree. Later, I related the event to George Smith who covered me with contumely. That a man should find a tree and then be driven off by the bees before he could blaze it, Smith regarded as a disgrace. He assured me that he would take up the tree himself without benefit of veil or gloves. I knew better than to argue, but on the appointed time when he, my brother and I went to take up the tree, I brought two veils and two pairs of gauntlets. When we got to the tree I set about collecting dry stuff for a smudge, a matter which Smith said was quite unnecessary. I was downhill from the tree when he went to work. I heard the axe fall perhaps a half a dozen times, and then there was a siren-like wail of profanity, and Smith came charging through the woods, a stream of angry bees behind him like a comet’s tail. That was one swarm which defeated the intrepid Smith. He borrowed my brother’s net and gloves, my brother went off and hid in the woods, and with net and glove protection and a smudge as well, we cut into the tree and took up the swarm. We got sixty pounds of honey.
In this article I have alluded many times to “taking up” a bee tree. The phrase may be colloquial, but it sticks. Smith never cut a bee tree. He always “took it up.” Moreover, he always referred to a bee as “he.” I am well aware that a working bee is a sterile female, but I cannot bring myself to call it “she.” There is nothing feminine about a working bee but its anatomy. “She” is “he” to me.
A word or two in more detail 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. It is done in the autumn, and the cold soon kills the bees. They are deprived of food and shelter and have no time to gather more of the one or repair the other. They have laboured hard and are pitilessly robbed not only of the fruits of their labour, but of their very lives. They have been friendly during the running, and one has acquired an affection for them. How then can a reasonably tender-hearted person bring himself to destroy them?
A reason I can give, 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 stops, 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 just 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 everything for the hive; nothing for a fellow bee. A bee from a strange swarm, alighting on the comb, will be instantly attacked. On the other hand, if one tries 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 ear—and his fellow worker, loading half an inch away, will pay absolutely 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. The living thing that is the hive is extinguished, and the individual bees become mere insects doomed to winter destruction as are so many of the common flies. For the individual, the hunter has merely hastened dissolution by a little. He has killed the hive with the crash of the tree. I state this not as an apology, but as a fact, an explanation of why one’s conscience does not trouble one after taking up a tree. Illogical it may be, but it is true.
To return to the process. The days have lengthened, and October has come. Frost has killed the flowers. The bees have gathered the maximum of honey and will have begun to consume the store. It is time to take up. For equipment 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 easier and 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 or an overcast one, but not one with a threat of rain. 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. In New Hampshire they are not hard to find. Probably they are working for you on your own place or for your neighbour. A few men have a rooted fear of bees and will be unavailable. The average lumberman, if promised reasonable protection, will come along and face the hard work for the fun. Taking up a bee tree is an exciting and thrilling performance. Lastly, bring plenty of receptacles for the honey. The humiliation of returning with five pounds of comb in a wash boiler is nothing as compared to the exasperation of filling a couple of buckets and finding you have no way of transporting the rest of the honey that is left in the tree.
Thus equipped you sally forth, hunter, woodsmen, and usually one or two camp followers in the way of guests or the curious. Your tree has been marked with your initials and a trail blazed to it with your hand axe so you have no difficulty in finding it. If it is on your property, well and good. If not, your New Hampshire farmer is usually a reasonable being if you treat him properly. A bee tree is not valuable. The mere fact that it has a hollow generally proves that it is not commercially valuable for anything but firewood, and after it is felled, if the owner wants to work it up into firewood, he is at liberty to do so. A proper approach and the promise of a jar or two of honey will usually win you permission to take up the tree, and the owner will come along to watch the fun. In all my many years of experience, I have only once been refused permission to take up a bee tree without payment.