66 
FOLLOWING THE BEE LINE 
expecting trouble. They were a big, booming lot 
of bees, but queerly enough they didn’t seem to 
mind me or anything I did—I squatted on a slip¬ 
pery ledge, chipping and knocking away the rock 
right there where they were streaming in and out. 
. . . Pretty soon I took off my coat. . . . 
Then my gloves, then my veil . . . and finally 
my undershirt! And I didn’t put them on again 
either. The rock was soft—a sort of decomposed 
granite, and it didn’t take long to make an opening 
big enough for me to crawl partly in. There was 
a space inside as big as a small closet, almost filled 
with comb. I got one of my best colonies from that 
rock, as well as a wash boiler full of the best honey 
I ever swallowed—and not a sting! ” 
Guided by a friendly neighbor, I tramped up 
Eagle Canyon, in the foothills of the Santa Rosa 
Mountains and found another “canyon colony” 
there. The canyon was wild and rocky, fulfilling 
all an easterner’s ideas of what a western canyon 
should be. Jagged, precipitous cliffs of red rock 
towered above us, with gray-green growth in places, 
and a chance barrel or cholla cactus lending a 
fantastic desert note. 
At the start we found walking easy along the 
sand bed where water races down from the moun- 
