74 PEPACTON 



exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet distant. One 

 would have expected them under such circumstances 

 to have gone straight home, as there were but few 

 branches intervening, but they did not; they la- 

 bored up through the trees and attained an altitude 

 above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and 

 thus baffled me for hours. Bees will always do 

 this. They are acquainted with the woods only 

 from the top side, and from the air above; they 

 recognize home only by landmarks here, and in 

 every instance they rise aloft to take their bearings. 

 Think how familiar to them the topography of the 

 forest summits must be, — an umbrageous sea or 

 plain where every mark and point is known. 



Another curious fact is that generally you will 

 get track of a bee-tree sooner when you are half a 

 mile from it than when you are only a few yards. 

 Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in the 

 near at hand; they expect to make their fortune in 

 a distant field, they are lured by the remote and 

 the difficult, and hence overlook the flower and the 

 sweet at their very door. On several occasions I 

 have unwittingly set my box within a few paces of 

 a bee-tree and waited long for bees without getting 

 them, when, on removing to a distant field or open- 

 ing in the woods, I have got a clew at once. 



I have a theory that when bees leave the hive, 

 unless there is some special attraction in some other 

 direction, they generally go against the wind. 

 They would thus have the wind with them when 

 they returned home heavily laden, and with these 



