the tree-tops with their burdens, swerving neither to the
right hand nor to the left. It is almost pathetic to see them labor so,
climbing the mountain and unwittingly guiding us to their treasures.
When the sun gets down so that his direction corresponds exactly with
the course of the bees, we make the plunge. It proves even harder
climbing than we had anticipated; the mountain is faced by a broken and
irregular wall of rock, up which we pull ourselves slowly and cautiously
by main strength. In half an hour, the perspiration streaming from
every pore, we reach the summit. The trees here are all small, a second
growth, and we are soon convinced the bees are not here. Then down we
go on the other side, clambering down the rocky stairways till we reach
quite a broad plateau that forms something like the shoulder of the
mountain. On the brink of this there are many large hemlocks, and we
scan them closely and rap upon them with our ax. But not a bee is seen
or heard; we do not seem as near the tree as we were in the fields
below; yet if some divinity would only whisper the fact to us we are
within a few rods of the coveted prize, which is not in one of the large
hemlocks or oaks that absorb our attention, but in an old stub or stump
not six feet high, and which we have seen and passed several times
without giving it a thought. We go farther down the mountain and beat
about to the right and left and get entangled in brush and arrested by
precipices, and finally as the day is nearly spent, give up the search
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 hone