82 BEES. 
the tree that contains the cavity ; or to leave the tree 
till fall, then invite your neighbors, and go and cut 
it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former 
course is more business-like; but the latter is the 
one usually recommended by one’s friends and neigh- 
bors. 
Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms 
leave when no one is about, and hence are unseen and 
unheard, save, perchance, by some distant laborers in 
the field, or by some youth ploughing on the side of 
the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, 
and sees the swarm dimly whirling by overhead, and, 
may be, gives chase; or he may simply catch the 
sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees 
nothing. When he comes in at night he tells how 
he heard or saw a swarm of bees go over; and, per- 
haps from beneath one of the hive$ in the garden a 
black mass of bees has disappeared during the day. 
They are not partial as to the kind of tree, — pine, 
hemlock, elm, birch, maple, hickory, — any tree with 
a good cavity high up or low down. A swarm of 
mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them, 
and took up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an 
old apple-tree across an‘adjoining field. The entrance 
was a mouse-hole near the ground. 
Another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their 
keeper and went into the cornice of an out-house that 
stood amid evergreens in the rear of a large mansion. 
But there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as 
Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the 
carcass, or more probably the skeleton, of the lion he 
had slain. 
In any given locality, especially in the more wooded 
and mountainous districts, the number of swarms that 
