&6 BEES. 



all his eager, miserly habits. The honey-bee's great 

 ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to 

 possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. She is 

 more than provident. Enough will not satisfy her. 

 she must have all she can get by hook or by crook. 

 She comes from the oldest country, Asia, and thrives 

 best in the most fertile and long-settled lands. 



Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essen- 

 tially a wild creature, and never has been and can- 

 not be thoroughly domesticated. Its proper home is 

 the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on 

 going ; and thither many do go in spite of the care 

 and watchfulness of the bee-keeper. If the woods 

 in any given locality are deficient in trees with suit- 

 able cavities, the bees resort to all sorts of make- 

 shifts ; they go into chimneys, into barns and out- 

 houses, under stones, into rocks, and so forth. Sev- 

 eral chimneys in my locality with disused flues are 

 taken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every 

 season. One day, while bee-hunting, I developed a 

 line that w r ent toward a farm-house where I had rea- 

 son to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up 

 and questioned the farmer about his bees. He said 

 he kept no bees, but that a swarm had taken pos- 

 session of his chimney, and another had gone under 

 the clapboards in the gable end of his house. He 

 fiad taken a large lot of honey out of both places 

 the year before. Another farmer told me that one 

 day his family had seen a number of bees examining 

 a knot-hole in the side of his house ; the next day as 

 they were sitting down to dinner their attention was 

 attracted by a loud humming noise, when they dis- 

 covered a swarm of bees settling upon the side of the 

 house and pouring into the knot-hole. In subsequent 

 years other swarms came to the same place. 



