384 Next to the Ground 



milk. The whitest, richest, finest flavored 

 of all honey is that from peach blossoms. 

 Next comes that garnered from raspberry and 

 blackberries in bloom ; after that the product 

 of white clover, with linden-bloom honey a 

 very close second. Buckwheat makes heavy 

 yields of honey, but it is cloying and sickish- 

 sweet. Goldenrod taints fall honey with a 

 faint weedy taint. Honey ravaged from plums 

 or grapes is fine and flavorous, though not very 

 light. The trouble with such bee-pasturage 

 is that it goes to the head, and makes the 

 bees for the time too convivially inclined to 

 think of real work. 



New swarms are finicky as to where they 

 will settle. Sometimes they go inside a hive, 

 stay there a week, and begin working blithely, 

 then all at once are up and ofF. Rubbing a 

 hive inside with peach-tree leaves or smoking 

 it lightly with sulphur is thought to make a new 

 swarm better content. In flying, a swarm 

 looks like a small brown cloud, careering, 

 or, more properly, rolling just above the tree- 

 tops. At first swarming bees settle in thick 

 clumps upon anything handy, the queen in 

 the middle, the others massed all over her. 

 Sometimes the mass droops in a long blunt 

 pendant almost like an icicle. If the swarm 

 comes out after midday it is likely to settle 

 close to the hive and stay quiet until morning. 



