University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.
A Bee Hunt.

The beautiful forest in which we were encamped
abounded in bee trees; that is to say, trees in
the decayed trunks of which wild bees had established
their hives. It is surprising in what
countless swarms the bees have overspread the
far west, within but a moderate number of years.
The Indians consider them the harbinger of the
white man, as the Buffalo is of the red man;
and say that, in proportion as the bee advances,
the Indian and Buffalo retire. We are always
accustomed to associate the hum of the bee-hive
with the farm house and flower garden, and to
consider those industrious little animals as connected
with the busy haunts of man, and I am
told that the wild bee is seldom to be met with
at any great distance from the frontier. They
have been the heralds of civilization, steadfastly
preceding it as it advanced from the Atlantic
borders, and some of the ancient settlers of the
west pretend to give the very year when the
honey bee first crossed the Mississippi. The
Indians with surprise found the mouldering trees

of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial
sweets, and nothing, I am told, can exceed the
greedy relish with which they banquet for the
first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness.

At present the honey bee swarms in myriads,
in the noble groves and forests that skirt and intersect
the prairies, and extend along the alluvial
bottoms of the rivers. It seems to me as if
these beautiful regions answer literally to the
description of the land of promise, “a land flowing
with milk and honey;” for the rich pasturage
of the prairies is calcuated to sustain herds
of cattle as countless as the sands upon the seashore,
while the flowers with which they are
enamelled render them a very paradise for the
nectar-seeking bee.

We had not been long in the camp when a
party set out in quest of a bee tree; and, being
curious to witness the sport, I gladly accepted
an invitation to accompany them. The party
was headed by a veteran bee hunter, a tall lank
fellow in homespun garb that hung loosely about
his limbs, and a straw hat shaped not unlike a
bee-hive; a comrade, equally uncouth in garb,
and without a hat, straddled along at his heels,
with a long rifle on his shoulder. To these succeeded
half a dozen others, some with axes and
some with rifles, for no one stirs far from the

camp without his fire-arms, so as to be ready
either for wild deer or wild Indian.

After proceeding some distance we came to
an open glade on the skirts of the forest. Here
our leader halted, and then advanced quietly to
a low bush, on the top of which I perceived a
piece of honey-comb. This I found was the
bait or lure for the wild bees. Several were
humming about it, and diving into its cells.
When they had laden themselves with honey
they would rise into the air, and dart off in a
straight line, almost with the velocity of a bullet.
The hunters watched attentively the course they
took, and then set off in the same direction,
stumbling along over twisted roots and fallen
trees, with their eyes turned up to the sky. In
this way they traced the honey laden bees to
their hive, in the hollow trunk of a blasted oak,
where, after buzzing about for a moment, they
entered a hole about sixty feet from the ground.

Two of the Bee hunters now plied their axes
vigorously at the foot of the tree to level it with
the ground. The mere spectators and amateurs,
in the mean time, drew off to a cautious distance,
to be out of the way of the falling of the tree
and the vengeance of its inmates. The jarring
blows of the axe seemed to have no effect in
alarming or disturbing this most industrious community.
They continued to ply at their usual

occupations, some arriving full freighted into
port, others sallying forth on new expeditions,
like so many merchantmen in a money making
metropolis, little suspicious of impending bankruptcy
and downfall. Even a loud crack which
announced the disrupture of the trunk, failed to
divert their attention from the intense pursuit of
gain; at length down came the tree with a tremendous
crash, bursting open from end to end,
and displaying all the hoarded treasurers of the
commonwealth.

One of the hunters immediately ran up with a
whisp of lighted hay as a defence against the
bees. The latter, however, made no attack and
sought no revenge; they seemed stupified by the
catastrophe and unsuspicious of its cause, and
remained crawling and buzzing about the ruins
without offering us any molestation. Every one
of the party now fell to, with spoon and hunting
knife, to scoop out the flakes of honey-comb
with which the hollow trunk was stored. Some
of them were of old date and a deep brown
colour, others were beautifully white, and the
honey in their cells was almost limpid. Such of
the combs as were entire were placed in camp
kettles to be conveyed to the encampment; those
which had been shivered in the fall were devoured
upon the spot. Every stark bee hunter
was to be seen with a rich morsel in his hand,

dripping about his fingers, and disappearing as
rapidly as a cream tart before the holyday appetite
of a schoolboy.

Nor was it the bee hunters alone that profited
by the downfall of this industrious community;
as if the bees would carry through the similitude
of their habits with those of laborious and gainful
man, I beheld numbers from rival hives,
arriving on eager wing, to enrich themselves
with the ruins of their neighbours. These busied
themselves as eagerly and cheerfully as so many
wreckers on an Indiaman that has been driven
on shore; plunging into the cells of the broken
honey combs, banqueting greedily on the spoil,
and then winging their way full freighted to
their homes. As to the poor proprietors of the
ruin, they seemed to have no heart to do any
thing, not even to taste the nectar that flowed
around them; but crawled backwards and forwards,
in vacant desolation, as I have seen a
poor fellow with his hands in his breeches pocket,
whistling vacantly and despondingly about the
ruins of his house that had been burnt.

It is difficult to describe the bewilderment and
confusion of the bees of the bankrupt hive who
had been absent at the time of the catastrophe,
and who arrived from time to time, with full
cargoes from abroad. At first they wheeled
about in the air, in the place where the fallen

tree had once reared its head, astonished at finding
it all a vacuum. At length, as if comprehending
their disaster, they settled down in clusters
on a dry branch of a neighbouring tree,
from whence they seemed to contemplate the
prostrate ruin, and to buzz forth doleful lamentations
over the downfall of their republic. It was
a scene on which the “melancholy Jacques”
might have moralized by the hour.

We now abandoned the place, leaving much
honey in the hollow of the tree. “It will all be
cleared off by varmint,” said one of the rangers.
“What vermin?” asked I. “Oh bears, and
skunks, and raccoons, and 'possums. The bears
is the knowingest varmint for finding out a bee
tree in the world. They'll gnaw for days together
at the trunk till they make a hole big
enough to get in their paws, and then they'll
haul out honey, bees and all.”