“The climber, as he ascends, cuts fresh notches into the bark with his tomahawk....”
2. Wordaman tree-climber.
“... the hunter is virtually hanging by his arms, which are hooked by the hands, and is sitting upon his heels.”
All along the north coast, a welcome addition to the daily fare is wild bees’ honey, or as it is now generally called by the semi-civilized tribes “sugar-bag.” The wild bee establishes its hive either in a hollow tree or in a crevice in the ground, and the hunting native—man, woman, or child—is ever on the look-out for it. When the exit of a hive has been discovered in the ground, from which numerous bees are flying, the lucky finder immediately begins to carefully dig down along the narrow channel until he reaches the honeycomb. If the supply is limited, it is usually removed in toto by hand and lifted to his mouth without further ado. If, on the other hand, there is a goodly amount available, the whole of the comb is collected and placed in a cooleman or other food-carrier and taken to camp.
When a hive is located in a hollow tree, the native places his ear against the butt and listens; by frequently altering the position of his ear like one undertaking a medical auscultation, he can gauge the exact position of the hive by the murmur and buzz beneath the bark. It is then a simple matter for him to cut into the cover and collect the honeycomb. Some of the experienced hunters can “smell” their way for a considerable distance to a wild-bee hive.
The Victoria River tribes have invented an ingenious device, by means of which they can secure honey from otherwise inaccessible fissures in rocks or hollows in stout-butted trees. A long stick is selected, to one end of which is tied a bundle of vegetable fibre or pounded bark. With the bundle forward, the stick is poked into the cleft leading to the hive, and, when the honey-comb is reached, it is turned around and allowed to absorb some of the honey. Then the stick is quickly removed and the absorbed honey squeezed from the fibres into a receptacle. The process is repeated, time after time, until the greater part of the honey has been obtained.
Wild bee honey is very liquid, but, nevertheless, quite as sweet and tasty as that of the Ligurian bee. The wild bee, moreover, possesses no sting, and so offers no serious resistance to the enthusiasm of the collector. The bee itself is comparatively small, about the size of an ordinary house fly.
There are no wild bees in central Australia, but in their stead appears the honey ant (Melophorus inflatus). These remarkable insects live underground, usually in the red sandy loams carrying forests of mulga. Throughout the MacDonnell Ranges, and the country north and south-west of them, and in the Musgrave Ranges district, they are eagerly looked for by the local tribes. When the entrance to a nest has been discovered, a gin at once sets to by inserting a thin stick as a guide and digging down the course of the hole. This is a somewhat tedious undertaking, and not infrequently she has to dig to so great a depth as to completely bury herself. On several occasions I have unexpectedly come across a woman thus engaged, and neither was she aware of my coming, nor I of her presence, until right opposite her. The “honey-ant” itself is a modified worker of the colony, which is so overfed by the ordinary workers that its abdomen swells to the size of a marble, about three-eighths of an inch in diameter, in consequence of the liquid honey stored within. With the exception of the few transverse plates, the abdominal walls are reduced to an extremely fine membrane, through which the honey can be clearly seen from outside. The insect’s viscera are compressed into a small space near the vent. The ant, in this condition, is naturally unable to move from the spot. It appears that the inflated ants in this phenomenal way provide for the needs of the colony during the barren season of the year, acting in the capacity of living tanks or barrels, which can be tapped as required.
The gin collects numbers of these ants, as she burrows her way downwards, and lays them in her cooleman; when the nest has been ransacked she returns with her prize to camp.