78 BEES. 
with her or else the young queen had been liberated 
in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, 
for it was ten days before the swarm issued a second 
time. | 
No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees 
house-hunting in the woods. Yet there can be no 
doubt that they look up new quarters either before 
or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are 
wild bees and incapable of domestication ; that is, the 
instinct to go back to nature and take up again their 
wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated. Years 
upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no 
appreciable effect towards their final, permanent do- 
mestication. That every new swarm contemplates 
migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact 
that they will only come out when the weather is 
favorable to such an enterprise, and that a passing 
cloud, or a sudden wind, after the bees are in the air, 
will usually drive them back into the parent hive. 
Or an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose 
earth or water, will quickly cause them to change 
their plans. I would not even say but that, when the 
bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, 
now entirely discredited by regular bee-keepers but 
still resorted to by unscientific folk, of beating upon 
tin pans, blowing horns, and creating an uproar gen- 
erally, might not be without good results. Certainly 
not by drowning the “ orders” of the queen, but by 
impressing the bees as with some unusual commotion 
in nature. Bees are easily alarmed and disconcerted, 
and I have known runaway swarms to be brought 
down by a farmer ploughing in the field who show. 
ered them with handfuls of loose soil. 
IT love to see aswarm go off —if it is not mine, 
i 
j 
