The Bee Hunter

This little treatise is in part the child of frustration, in part the child of irritation. In a modest way, the writer has been an author. The first book he ever wrote, an opus of several chapters, was called “The Bee Hunter.” The writer was then eighteen. Submitted, on the advice of the late Robert W. Chambers, to his publisher in New York, the young author was surprised to learn that his manuscript was rejected. The publisher tactfully pointed out that even the English translation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s La Vie des Abeilles had lost money for its publisher.

The manuscript was put away to gather dust. I believe and trust now that it is lost. It was terrible.

So much for the frustration. Now for the irritation. Being an unsung author on the subject and, more important, a successful bee hunter of fifty years’ experience, the writer has read a certain number of articles on bee hunting. One appears every year or two. Starting with two essays by John Burroughs, one fact is common to all. They are written by men who never possibly could have found a bee tree, at least by pursuing the methods they describe. Burroughs came nearest the truth, but even he seems to have got his account from some farmer with more imagination than experience. It is time for someone who has hunted bees and found bee trees to write the facts. For bee hunting is rapidly becoming a lost art.

The writer’s interest in the sport began at the age of ten when he was initiated by an old Adirondacker who had sunk to driving his grandfather’s mules in Newport, New Hampshire. George Smith, as I shall call him, was a character, to the youngster as fabulous as Paul Bunyan. He took his whiskey neat. He smoked and chewed at the same time and could spit without removing the pipe from his mouth. His profanity could take the bluing off a gun barrel. Withal, he was one of the kindest and most generous of men and a mighty bee hunter before the Lord, or the devil if one prefers. He introduced the boy to the simple equipment necessary for the art, and though through the years I have improved it slightly, the fundamentals of the few objects have remained the same.

The most important item is the bee box. This one can make oneself if one is clever, or employ a cabinetmaker to do it from specifications if, like the writer, one is not. The box should be of wood, about five and one-half inches long, three inches wide, and three inches deep. The wood of an old-fashioned cigar box is an excellent material but if used, the box should be left outdoors some time to weather, as bees do not like the odor of tobacco. The box should be divided into two compartments, the front one open with a hinged lid. In the lid there should be a small glass window which can be darkened by a wooden slide. Between the front and rear compartments there should be an opening at the bottom two-thirds of an inch wide which can be opened and closed by a wooden slide manipulated from the outside. The rear of the inside compartment should be of glass, covered with a wooden slide which can be raised on occasion to admit light to the compartment. The box should be nicely and tightly constructed, shellacked after completion, and lightproof. Remember, it will be out in all sorts of weather and the older it is, and the more weathered it becomes, the better the bees will like it.

Provided with the box, the rest is easy. One needs a couple of pieces of empty honeycomb cut square to drop easily into the front compartment. The best is old, black comb from an old bee tree, but any empty comb will do. For nectar it is not necessary to use real honey. A syrup of common white sugar one-third, and water two-thirds, boiled for fifteen minutes and then cooled, seems to be as tempting to bees as real honey. If one keeps it so long that it begins to ferment, no matter. Bees’ taste is not nice in such matters. Bees will cheerfully work the fermented juice of a rotten pear. As a refinement, it is well to provide oneself with a tiny bottle of the oil of anise. If used sparingly, this will attract bees, and the faint odor on a bee’s feet will attract others. When I say sparingly, I mean more than the word ordinarily implies. The cork of the anise bottle rubbed on the comb and the comb then licked with the tongue will provide anise enough for one’s purpose. More will make the bees quite drunk, they will refuse to suck but buzz around looking for the anise and eventually retire to the flowers to sober up, and you will lose your line. To fill the comb, a common eye dropper is very handy though not absolutely necessary. It is handy, too, to have a stand made of an upright piece of wood such as a four-foot section of a rake handle with a flat board nailed on top and the lower end sharpened so it can easily be thrust in the ground, but a stand can always be improvised using a young spruce cut off at the top or a few stones pilfered from a stone wall. It is also handy to have another small box with a lid, not a bee box, in which to carry small objects. The paraphernalia is therefore very simple, and a good bee hunter can get along if necessary with less. George Smith and I once started a line using an empty 32 calibre cartridge box and a bit of comb stolen dangerously from a nest of paper wasps. Finally it would be well to have a cloth bag or knapsack in which the smaller articles may be carried, leaving the hands free.

A medicine dropper is convenient when filling the piece of comb with sugar syrup]

We are now ready to start but should consider the season. There is no point in going bee hunting if one can find no bees. Bees begin to work as soon as spring gets warm and continue until severe frost. This can be proved by examining any hive on any warm day, but what the bees are working on is another question. They are hard to find except during some definite honey flow such as the white clover season or the milkweed or the goldenrod. Especially the last two are favourable. On the bee box I have used for a good many years, I have scribbled the dates of the findings of fifty-six bee trees. Eighty per cent are in July or September. Only occasionally does one occur in June or August and practically never in October. July and September mean milkweed and goldenrod to the bee hunter.

Let us assume that it is a warm day in mid-July and the milkweed is in bloom. We find a patch and find it teeming with honey bees. Incidentally the first step should be to learn what a honey bee looks like. He resembles a refined and streamlined horsefly and is totally unlike the fuzzy bumble bee that so many mistakenly regard as honey bees. One’s first task is to catch a bee. This is done by bringing the box up sharply under him with the lid open as he sits on the edge of a bloom and slapping the lid home as he tumbles into the box. It is not so hard as it sounds, especially if the bee is on a high bloom of milkweed or goldenrod. It is essential that the bee be caught. During the midst of a good honey flow a bee will never voluntarily abandon the flowers and go to a comb, no matter with what aromatic lure you may have anointed it. Forget for all time the accounts of writers who drench a handkerchief with anise and throw it over a bush near a stand with loaded comb. No bee would come near it. During a starvation period when flowers are scarce, especially after the autumnal frosts, a bee will light on the comb if he finds it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, however, the bees will be somewhere else and no bee will find the comb. There have been exceptions as I shall show, but the only sensible procedure is to hunt bees during a honey flow when they are easy to find, and introduce them into the box by violence.

The bee will be scooped into the outer compartment and the lid snapped shut simultaneously]

Having caught the bee in the outer compartment and verifying the fact that he is there by looking in the window, the next step is to close the window, darken the outer compartment, open the slide to admit him to the rear and open the rear window. Seeing the light, the bee will promptly go in there, seeking escape. Then one can close the rear compartment and open the front so as to catch another bee. One can start a line with one bee, but the chance of success is greater if one has a dozen, and during a good honey flow, if the tree is not too far away, these can be caught in ten minutes.

Provided with a dozen bees one is ready to start the line. Fill one of the pieces of comb with syrup. Thrust in the stand if you have one. Open the window into the outer compartment and the door between and admit three or four bees to the part with the comb. They will come if you open the window in front and darken the rear. Then put the box down gently, darken the whole box, put your hat over it and leave it still for three or four minutes. Meanwhile, fill the other comb. After three or four minutes, place the box on the stand and gently open the lid. If conditions are right, the bees will have found the syrup and taken a load in the darkness. Sometimes one or two will not have finished loading and will sit quietly until they are stuffed to capacity. If they are loaded, they will fly comparatively slowly as they take off to return to the hive. When they have left, repeat the whole process and let out more bees until all have gone. You are now in the stage of starting to establish the line.

The slide on the side of the box is pulled to open the entrance to the rear compartment, the rear window is opened, and the bee follows the light into the rear compartment]

Where most of the nature fakers fall down conspicuously is in describing how to establish a “bee line” giving the exact direction of the bee tree. Actually, when a bee leaves for the first time he is both suspicious and anxious to establish the position of the stand. He leaves in slowly expanding spirals and figure eights. The hunter rolls round on his back trying to follow the convolutions of the bee flight in the air. Usually it ends by the bee flying between the eye and the sun and thus being lost to view. If the hunter can establish when the bee leaves for the first time, whether the tree is more north than south or more east than west, he is doing well. It is not until a bee has come and gone eight or ten times that he becomes familiar with the stand, loses his suspicions, and, on taking off, goes in approximately the direction of the tree thus at last creating a “bee line.”

Two bee boxes are on the stand in this illustration. The lid of the outer compartment of the top box has just been opened, and the bees are about to emerge]

If conditions are right, of your dozen bees four or five will return for a second load. Again if conditions are right, in an hour or two these will communicate in some mysterious way with other workers in the hive that there is free lunch obtainable and the number of bees on the line will increase. Especially if the tree is near and the flowers not too profuse, this will happen quickly. At best I have had a hundred or more bees running my line half an hour after the first bee left. At times, and this is a common occurrence, no bee will come back at all. Sometimes the original bees will go back and forth but bring no companions. Often the bees will refuse to suck at all but will return on release to the flowers. When that happens, you had best pack up and go home and wait for more propitious conditions.