HUNTING THE HONEY-BEE 245 



than maple sap or sugar. There is a tradition that 

 an Indian wizard was feasted on bread and honey, 

 and strong water sweetened with honey, by the 

 wife of a Puritan magistrate, to the great satis- 

 faction of the inner red man. Learning whence 

 the lucent syrup came, he told the bees such tales 

 of the flowers of the forest, blooming from the 

 sunny days of mid-April till into the depth of 

 winter (for he bethought him that the sapless 

 yellow blossoms of his own witch-hazel would in 

 some sort bear out his word), that all the young 

 swarms betook themselves to the wild woods and 

 made their home therein. Another legend is that 

 the wizard, in some way learning the secret of the 

 bees, took on the semblance of their queen, and 

 led a swarm into the woods, where he established 

 it in a hollow tree, and so began the generation of 

 wild bees. 



However it came about, swarms of bees now 

 and then lapsed into the primitive ways of life 

 that their remote ancestors held, and have con- 

 tinued to do so down to these times, and will, 

 when the freak takes them, utterly refuse to be 

 charmed or terrified into abiding with their owners 

 by any banging of pans or blowing of horns. 



No one knows who our first bee-hunter was, 

 whether black bear, red Indian, or white hunter, 

 but the bear or the Indian was likeliest to become 

 such. Bruin's keen nose was his guide to the prize. 



