“Yes, that is sometimes done,” his father replied. “And he might even get his swarm of bees back, if he could find the right hollow tree. But that isn’t easy. In the olden days, before men knew how to build little houses, or hives, for the bees to live in, all the honey was stored in hollow trees. But men studied the ways of bees, they learned the manner in which queens ruled and how swarming came about, and they built hives in which it is easier for the bees to store their honey, and from which it is also easier to take it.”
“What about that smoke?” asked Rose. “I didn’t know bees liked smoke.”
She was speaking of the queer machine that Farmer Joel carried. They could see smoke coming from it now in a cloud.
Later, when they had time to look at the smoke machine, the six little Bunkers saw that it was like a funnel with a bellows, or blower, beneath it. A fire of rags or rotten wood could be built in the larger part of the tin funnel, and when the bellows was pressed this blew out a cloud of smoke.
“Bees don’t like smoke,” said Daddy Bunker. “But when a cloud of it is blown on them it makes them rather stupid—it calms and quiets them so they are less likely to sting whoever is working around them. And a little smoke does them no harm; though, of course, if they had too much of it they would die.
“So when a man works in his apiary he puts a mosquito veil over his head and takes his smoker. A few puffs from that down in a hive of bees will so quiet the insects that he can, with his bare hands, pick them up and they will not sting him. In this way he can also pick out the queen from among her thousands of workers and put her in another hive. If he can do this in time he will stop the swarm from dividing, part of it flying away, as just happened.”
“Bees are queer,” said Russ.
“Indeed, they are! But I like to hear about them,” said Rose.
By this time Farmer Joel was out of sight in the woods, where his runaway swarm had gone, and as the children had not been allowed to follow they played about, waiting for Mr. Todd to return.
“Will he bring the bees back with him?” asked Russ.