380 The Honey-Makers 



sweeping over the country with what Muir calls their 

 " hoofed locusts " and laying waste the beautiful valleys as 

 if a fire had devastated them. And yet there is abundant 

 pasture for almost innumerable swarms of bees. 



The bees of California, Hke those of' India, and in fact 

 of all warm cHmates, sometimes hang their combs in the 

 open air, and Muir says : — 



" Out in the broad, swampy delta of the Sacramento and 

 San Joaquin rivers, the little wanderers have been known 

 to build their combs in a bunch of rushes, or stiff, wiry 

 grass, only slightly protected from the weather, and in 

 danger every spring of being carried away by floods. They 

 have the advantage, however, of a vast extent of fresh pas- 

 ture, accessible only to themselves." 



Sometimes the bees of California hang their combs in 

 the branches of the trees, and in Ireland the bees sometimes 

 build in trees or bushes, the combs weighing the twigs of 

 the bushes to the ground ; and the present writer has seen 

 combs built in the open air under the eaves of a barn in 

 Rhode Island, where the weather is certainly too severe to 

 allow of wintering out of doors. These combs, however, 

 appeared to be an overflow, so to speak, from the well- 

 filled space between the roof and sides of the barn, where 

 a large quantity of honey must have been stored away. 



Bees sometimes select strange quarters for their hives, it 

 being recorded that in a French fort on the African coast 

 in 1702, an empty powder cask was taken possession of 

 and filled with honey by a swarm of bees, while Muir say3 

 that a friend of his, while out hunting on the San Joaquin, 

 sat down to rest upon an old coon trap he found, but which 

 proved to be occupied by a swarm of bees and to contain 

 more than two hundred pounds of honey. 



For several years a swarm of bees lived in the steeple of 

 a church .in a New Hampshire village. Finally, a large 



