HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE. THE PURITAN HOUSEWIFE. THE honey-bee came to America with civilization, probably with the Pilgrims, for such industrious and thrifty little people, withal so warlike upon occasion, and sometimes without, were likely to find favor with the pious fathers, who themselves possessed and valued these traits, and, after getting some foothold in their new home, would have had brought over in some small tub of a ship, tossed and buffeted across the wintry seas, a hive or two of real English bees. VOL. XXI.-14. How the home feeling came back to the Puritan housewife when the little house of straw, built in England, was duly set on its bench, and in the first warm days of the early spring its inmates awoke to find themselves in a wild, strange land, and buzzed forth to experiment on the sap of the maple logs in the woodpile. How sweet to her homesick heart their familiar drowsy hum, and how sad the memories they awakened of the fields of daisies and violets and blooming hedgerows in the loved England never to be seen again. There was rejoicing in the straw house when the willow catkins in the swamp and along the brook-sides turned from silver to gold, and a happy bee must she have been who first found the arbutus in its hidingplace among the dead leaves, and the clusters of liverwort nodding above their purple-green leaves in the April wind, and the light drift of shad-blows that gleamed in the gray woods. Here were treasures worth forsaking even England to gather. Later she found the columbine, drooping | over the ledge, heavy with sweets unattainable, and was fooled with the empty chalice of the bath-flower and with violets, blue as those of her own home, but scentless as spring-water. nose was his guide to the prize, the Indian's sharp eyes and woodcraft his, and the white man improved on the primitive ways by the invention of the bee-box and the science of cross-lining. Bee-trees are sometimes found by acciCatching the spirit of their masters, some dent, as when the bees, having been beof the bees set their light sails and vent- guiled untimely forth by the warmth of the ured far into the great, mysterious forest, February or March sunbeams, are benumbed and, founding colonies in hollow trees, began on exposure to the chill outer air and fall a life of independence. Their hoarded sweets helpless and conspicuous on the snow at the became known to the bears and the Indians, tree's foot; or when in more genial days no one knows how, or to which first. Per- the in-going or out-coming of the busy inhaps the first swarm that flew wild hived mates betrays their home to some hunter of itself inside a tree which was the winter larger game, or searcher for a particular home of a bear, who, climbing to his retreat kind or fashion of a timber tree. Well do I when the first snows had powdered the green remember how Uncle Key, veteran of our of the hemlocks and the russet floor of the then last war, first master of our post-office, woods, and backing down to his nest, found and most obliging (not "gentlemanly and his way impeded by shelves of comb, filled | efficient") of station-agents, discovered a with luscious sweetness the like of which no great bee-tree on the side of the "New New England bear had ever before tasted-Road" as it truly was then, and as it is and something to make his paws more savory sucking through the long months. Then the Indian, tracing him to his lair, secured a double prize-a fat bear, and something sweeter than maple sap or sugar. There is a tradition that an Indian wizard was feasted on bread and honey, and strong water sweetened with honey, by the wife of a Puritan magistrate, to the great satisfaction of the inner red man; and learning whence the lucent syrup came, he told the bees such tales of the flowers of the forest, blooming from the sunny days of mid-April till into the depth of winter (for he bethought him that the sapless yellow blossoms of his own witch-hazel would in some sort bear out his word), that all the young swarms betook themselves to the wild woods and made their home therein. Another legend is that the wizard, in some way learning the secret of the bees, took on the semblance of their queen, and led a swarm into the woods, where he established it in a hollow tree, and so began the generation of wild bees. However it came about, swarms of bees now and then lapsed into the primitive ways of life that their remote ancestors held, and have continued to do so down to these times, and will, when the freak takes them, utterly refuse to be charmed or terrified into abiding with their owners by any banging of pans or blowing of horns. No one knows who our first bee-hunter was, whether black bear, red Indian, or white hunter, but the bear or the Indian was likeliest to become such. Bruin's keen always will be called, I suppose, though its venerable projectors have long been laid to rest. Alert to profit by his discovery, Uncle Key called to his aid a couple of stout fellows, and with axes and vessels to hold a hundredweight or more of honey, he went to reap his reward. The tree was a monster; what an ocean of honey it might hold! There was no way in which it could be felled but right across the road, and there at last it lay, after much sweating of brows and lusty plying of axes-a barrier impassable to teams, athwart the commonwealth's highway, and nothing in it but a nest of yellowjackets! Another who suffered a like disappointment and a cruel stinging to boot, when asked, by one aware of the facts, "if he had got much honey," answered, as he rubbed open his swollen eyelids: "No, we didn't git much honey, but we broke up their cussed haunt." There was a degree of consolation in this. I do not like the bee-hunter as a beehunter, for he is a ruthless and lawless slayer of old trees. I cherish an abiding hatred of one who cut the last of the great buttonwoods on Sungahnee's bank. Think of his lopping down a tree whose broad leaves had dotted with shadow the passing canoes of Abenakis, in whose wide shade salmon swam and wild swans preened their snowy plumage in the old days, and for a paltry pailful of honey! I hope the price of his ill-gotten spoils burned his fingers and his pocket, and was spent to no purpose; that the honey he ate turned to acid in his maw and vexed his interior with gripes and colic; and I wish the bleaching bones of the murdered tree might arise nightly and confront him as a fearful ghost. Its roots were not in my soil, but its lordly branches grew in the free air which is as much mine as any man's, and when they were laid low I was done a grievous and irreparable wrong. A good and thoughtful man has such a tender feeling for trees and the rights of other men that he will think twice before he cuts even a sapling for his real need. I abhor those murdering fellows who think no more of taking the life of a tree a century or two old than they would of killing a man. Nevertheless, I have good friends who are bee-hunters, chief among them one who knows enough of nature's secrets to make the reputation of two or three naturalists. The successful issue of a bee-hunt gives the toil a veritable sweetening, but I think my friend is successful even when unsuccessful, and that there is something sweeter to him in the quest than in the finding of a wellfilled bee-tree. Our bee-hunter chooses August and September for his labor, or pastime, whichever it may be called, and he can hardly find a pleasanter day for it than one of those which August sometimes brings us in its later weeks-days that give us a foretaste of September's best, but are fuller of blossoms than they will be, though there are not enough flowers in the woods to keep the wild bees busy there. The sky is of purest blue, and across it a few clear-edged clouds, fleeces of silver and pearl, slowly drift before a fresh northerly breeze, and their swifter shadows drift across the ripening landscape -now darkening the green of meadow and pasture land, now the yellow of the stubble fields, and now flooding the light and shade of the woods with universal shadow. There is a wholesome coolness in the shade, and not too fervent warmth in the sunshine for one to bask comfortably therein if he will. The bee-hunter is burdened with but few implements in his chase: first of all, a "bee-box," six inches or so in length and a little less in width and height, with a hinged lid in which is set a small square of glass; midway between this and the bottom is a slide dividing the box into two compartments, the lower one holding a piece of honey-comb partly filled when in use with a thin syrup of white sugar and water; then an ax, or, perhaps, no larger cutting tool than a jack-knife; sometimes a compass, and, if he be of a feeding turn of stomach, a dinner-pail. So equipped, he takes the field, seeking his small quarry along wood-side meadow fences, whose stakes and top rails alone show above a flowery tangle of golden-rod, asters, and willow herb; in pastures that border the woods, dotted with these and thorny clumps of bull-thistles and the dark-green sedge and wild grass of the swales, overtopped by the dull white blossoms of boneset, pierced by clustered purple spikes of vervain, and here and there ablaze with the fire of the cardinal-flower. Carefully looking over the flowers as he goes slowly along, among the bumble-bees and wasps that are gathering from them their slender stores or present food his quick eye discovers a honey-bee alight on the upright tassel of a thistle, or sucking a medicated sweet from the bitter flower of |