THE PASTORAL BEES 13 



pathy with the distress of the queen mother, is hard 

 to determine. The moment it ceases and she ad- 

 vances again toward the royal cells, the hees bite and 

 pull and insult her as before. 



I always feel that I have missed some good for- 

 tune if I am away from home when my bees swarm. 

 What a delightful summer sound it is! how they 

 come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thou- 

 sand bees, each striving to get out first! It is as 

 when the dam gives way and lets the waters loose ; it 

 is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air, 

 and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the 

 eye, and a soft chorus of myriad musical sounds to 

 the ear. This way and that way they drift, now 

 contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing 

 thick about some branch or bush, then dispersing 

 and massing at some other point, till finally they be- 

 gin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments the 

 whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming 

 a bunch perhaps as large as a two-gallon measure. 

 Here they will hang from one to three or four hours 

 or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up, 

 when, if they have not 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 something was wrong; 



