and leave the woods quite baffled, but resolved to return on the
morrow. The next day we come back and commence operations in an
opening in the woods well down on the side of the mountain, where we
gave up the search. Our box is soon swarming with the eager bees,
and they go back toward the summit we have passed. We follow back and
establish a new line where the ground will permit; then another and
another, and yet the riddle is not solved. One time we are south of
them, then north, then the bees get up through the trees and we cannot
tell where they go. But after much searching, and after the mystery
seems rather to deepen than to clear up, we chance to pause beside the
old stump. A bee comes out of a small opening, like that made by ants
in decayed wood, rubs its eyes and examines its antennae as bees always
do before leaving their hive, then takes flight. At the same instant
several bees come by us loaded with our honey and settle home with that
peculiar low complacent buzz of the well-filled insect. Here then is
our idyl, our bit of Virgil and Theocritus, in a decayed stump of a
hemlock tree. We could tear it open with our hands, and a bear would
find it an easy prize, and a rich one too, for we take from it fifty
pounds of excellent honey. The bees have been here many years,
and have of course sent out swarm after swarm into the wilds. They
have protected themselves against the weather and strengthened their
shaky habitation by a copious use of wax.

When a bee-tree is thus "taken up" in the middle of the day, of course
a good many bees are away from home and have not heard the news.
When they return and find the ground flowing with honey, and piles of
bleeding combs lying about, they apparently do not recognize the place,
and their first instinct is to fall to and fill themselves; this done,
their next thought is to carry it home, so they rise up slowly through
the branches of the trees till they have attained an altitude that