October, 1918 
FOREST AND S T R E A M 
581 
if he has that tool with him, otherwise, 
with a knife. The mark is not intended 
to show who is the owner, but simply to 
indicate that the tree has been formally 
“discovered.” No man in the mountains 
will cut a tree with a mark upon it; if he 
does, he becomes a crook, and unworthy 
the respect of decent folk. 
Of course, it doesn’t matter whose land 
the tree stands on. There are no fences 
in the mountains, and a man hunts, or 
pastures cattle or cuts bee-trees wherever 
he lists, and pays tribute to nobody. The 
bee-tree being hollow for all or the greater 
part of its length is generally of little 
value for timber, though it must be ad¬ 
mitted that occasionally a tree is cut whose 
base would make good lumber. 
T HE tree may be cut at any time dur¬ 
ing the summer or fall. Such men 
as Hamp Lawson and Jake Sharp, 
who are ardent apiarists—each having 
many “stands” of bees in his yard—like to 
hive the swarm and carry it home, if pos- 
He watches the bee “take water” 
sible; and, unless the tree is too far dis¬ 
tant, and the intervening ground too rough, 
they often attempt to do this. If the 
swarm is to be hived, the tree must be cut 
early in the summer, so that the bees may 
have a few months in which to store food 
in their new hive for the winter. Most 
mountaineers, however, with characteristic 
improvidence and preference for the easi¬ 
est way, prefer to cut the tree late in the 
summer or fall, when it will be more fully 
stored with new honey, with the result that 
he swarm starves to death during the 
following winter. 
Jake Sharp’s method of hiving the bees 
s to place the open end of the box hive 
>ver the hole in the tree-trunk (this is 
tfter the tree is felled, of course), and 
hen start a tremendous thumping and 
drumming on the box. The old-time the¬ 
ory used in capturing a runaway swarm 
from the domestic hive—namely, that with 
your cow-bells, tin pans, etc., you must 
Two improvised bee-dresses 
make a noise of such volume that the bees 
cannot hear their own buzzing—seems to 
hold good in this method of hiving a wild 
swarm. However that may be, it is a fact 
that the swarm, with the exception of a 
few stragglers, often crawls right up into 
the box hive; a board is then slid across 
the open end, and secured with two or 
three nails, and the captive colony is car¬ 
ried home on a man’s shoulder. 
B EES vary greatly in their behavior 
after the tree is felled, and the spoil¬ 
er begins removing their hoard. Some 
show fight, while others appear dazed or 
cowed, and merely crawl about aimlessly, 
giving the hunters little trouble. I have 
never understood this difference in the at¬ 
titude of the bees. When the colony pours 
out and prepares to make a vicious defense 
of their roof-tree, the mountaineers will 
tell you with enthusiasm that this indicates 
a very rich hoard of honey; the theory be¬ 
ing that the larger the store, the greater 
the vexation of the bees at being robbed 
of it. I have seen this idea disproved, 
but most mountain men still believe in it. 
Jim Durham boasts that he never wears 
head-dress nor gloves when taking honey; 
Marking a bee-tree for his own 
and I can testify that I was once present 
when Jim, thus unprotected, robbed a 
fallen tree; calmly cutting out big slabs of 
honeycomb, scraping the bees off them 
with a case-knife, and dropping them in 
his bucket. If he received a single sting, 
I saw not a twitch of the muscles to in¬ 
dicate it. But on the other hand, it must 
be admitted that that was one of those 
non-resistant colonies of bees—genuine 
pacifists. I myself stood within a few feet 
of Jim, and received no hurt. I am con¬ 
fident that if Jim had gone barefaced and 
barehanded into the swarm that Arthur 
Francis and I tackled one day recently, 
they would have put him in bed for a week. 
John Baxter, although an indefatigable 
bee-hunter, and a honey-eater of unbeliev- 
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