46 BEES. 
all, his eager, miserly habits. The honey-bee’s great 
ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to 
possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. She is 
more than provident. Enough will not satisfy her; 
she must have all she can get by hook or by crook. 
She comes from the oldest country, Asia, and thrives 
best in the most fertile and long-settled lands. 
Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essen- 
tially a wild creature, and never has been and can- 
not be thoroughly domesticated. Its proper home is 
the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on 
going; and thither many do go in spite of the care 
and watchfulness of the bee-keeper. If the woods 
in any given locality are deficient in trees with suit- 
able cavities, the bees resort to all sorts of make- 
shifts; they go into chimneys, into barns and out- 
houses, under stones, into rocks, and so forth. Sev- 
eral chimneys in my locality with disused flues are 
taken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every 
season. One day, while bee-hunting, I developed a 
line that went toward a farm-house where I had rea- 
son to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up 
and questioned the farmer about his bees. He said 
he kept no bees, but that a swarm had taken pos- 
session of his chimney, and another had gone under 
the clapboards in the gable end of his house. He 
had taken a large lot of honey out of both places 
the year before. Another farmer told me that one 
day his family had seen a number of bees examining 
a knot-hole in the side of his house; the next day as 
they were sitting down to dinner their attention was 
attracted by aloud humming noise, when they dis- 
covered a swarm of bees settling upon the side of the 
house and pouring into the knot-hole. In subsequent 
years other swarms came to the same place. 
