an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a great
hindrance, but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with more ease.
Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as ballast, but their only ballast
is their honey bag. Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to
windward of the woods in which the swarm is supposed to have taken
refuge.

Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do water their
honey, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then of course thicker
and sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence, old bee-hunters look for
bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the woods. I once found
a tree a long distance from any water, and the honey had a peculiar
bitter flavor imparted to it, I was convinced, by rainwater sucked from
the decayed and spongy hemlock tree, in which the swarm was found.
In cutting into the tree, the north side of it was found to be
saturated with water like a spring, which ran out in big drops, and had
a bitter flavor. The bees had thus found a spring or a cistern in
their own house.

Bees are exposed to many hardships and many dangers. Winds and storms
prove as disastrous to them as to other navigators. Black spiders lie
in wait for them as do brigands for travelers. One day as I was
looking for a bee amid some golden-rod, I spied one partly concealed
under a leaf. Its baskets were full of pollen, and it did not move.
On lifting up the leaf I discovered that a hairy spider was ambushed
there and had the bee by the throat. The vampire was evidently afraid
of the bee's sting, and was holding it by the throat till quite sure of
its death. Virgil speaks of the painted lizard, perhaps a species of
salamander, as an enemy of the honey-bee. We have no lizard that
destroys the bee; but our tree-toad, ambushed among the apple and