22 THE PASTORAL BEES. 



been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up 

 and off. In hiving them, if any accident happens 

 to the queen the enterprise miscarries at once. One 

 day I shook a swarm from a small pear-tree into a 

 tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath 

 the tree, and put the hive over it. The bees presently 

 all crawled up into it, and all seemed to go well for 

 ten or fifteen minutes, when I observed that some- 

 thing was wrong ; the bees began to buzz excitedly 

 and to rush about in a bewildered manner, then they 

 took to the wing and all returned to the parent stock. 

 On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it the queen 

 with three or four other bees. She had been one of 

 the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and 

 I had set it upon her. I conveyed her tenderly back 

 to the hive, but either the accident terminated fatally 

 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 ap- 

 preciable effect towards their final, permanent domes- 

 tication. That every new swarm contemplates mi- 



