y 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 enables them to
survey the scene, when they seem to say, "Why, this is home," and down
they come again; beholding the wreck and ruins once more they still
think there is some mistake, and get up a second or a third time and
then drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic sight of
all, the surviving and bewildered bees struggling to save a few drops of
their wasted treasures.

Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods, robber-bees appear.
You may know them by their saucy, chiding, devil-may-care hum. It is
an ill wind that blows nobody good, and they make the most of the
misfortune of their neighbors; and thereby pave the way for their own
ruin. The hunter marks their course and the next day looks them up. On
this occasion the day was hot and the honey very fragrant, and a line of
bees was soon established S. S. W. Though there was much refuse honey in
the old stub, and though little golden rills trickled down the hill from
it, and the near branches and saplings were besmeared with it where we
wiped our murderous hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast to
which not only honey-bees came, but bumble-bees, wasps, hornets, flies,
ants. The bumble-bees, which at this season are hungry vagrants with
no fixed place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath the
bits of empty comb or fragments of bark and pass the night, and renew
the feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect