come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees, each
striving to get out first! It is as when the dam gives way and lets the
waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air,
and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye, and a soft
chorus of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they
drift, now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick
about some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other
point, till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few
moments the whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch
perhaps as large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one
to three or four hours or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked
up, when, if they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they
are up and off. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen
the enterprise miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small
pear-tree into a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath
the tree, and put the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up
into it, and all seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I
observed that something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and
to rush about in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and
all returned to the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found
beneath it the queen with three or four other bees. She had been one of
the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it
upon her. I conveyed her tenderly back to the hive, but either the
accident terminated fatally with her, or else the young queen had been
liberated in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it
was ten days before the swarm issued a second time.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the
woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and