AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 63 
of about twelve minutes between them; it returned 
alone each time; the tree, which I afterward found, 
was about half a mile distant. 
In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the 
hunter are to pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop 
away the branches or cut down the trees, and set the 
bees to work again. If they still go forward, he goes 
forward also and repeats his observations till the 
tree is found or till the bees turn and come back 
upon the trail. Then he knows he has passed the 
tree, and he retraces his steps to a convenient dis- 
tance and tries again, and thus quickly reduces the 
space to be looked over till the swarm is traced 
home. On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where 
the surface alternated between deep eulfs and chasms 
filled with thick, heavy growths of timber and sharp, 
precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest tossed sea, I 
carried my bees directly under their tree, and set 
them to work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not 
thirty feet distant. One would have expected them 
under such circumstances to have gone straight home, 
as there were but few branches intervening, but they 
did not; they labored up through the trees and at- 
tained an altitude above the woods as if they had 
miles to travel, and thus baffled me for hours. Bees 
will always do this. They are acquainted with the 
woods only from the top side, and from the air above; 
they recognize home only by land-marks here, and in 
every instance they rise aloft to take their bearings. 
Think how familiar to them the topography of the 
forest summits must be—an umbrageous sea or 
plain where every mark and point is known. 
Another curious fact is that generally you will get 
track of a bee-tree sooner when you are half a mile 
