, and the more broken outlines of the
Shawangunk range filled the rear. On every hand were precipices and a
wild confusion of rocks and trees.

The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a half long and
eight or ten inches in diameter. With an ax we cut away one side of the
tree and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of honey. It was a most
pleasing sight. What winding and devious ways the bees had through their
palace! What great masses and blocks of snow-white comb there were!
Where it was sealed up, presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface,
it looked like some precious ore. When we carried a large pail full of
it out of the woods, it seemed still more like ore.

Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of the tree by the time
the bee occupies in making its first trip. But this is no certain guide.
You are always safe in calculating that the tree is inside of a mile,
and you need not as a rule look for your bee's return under ten minutes.
One day I picked up a bee in an opening in the woods and gave it honey,
and it made three trips to my box with an interval of about twelve
minutes between them; it returned alone each time; the tree, which I
afterward found, was about half a mile distant.

In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter are to
pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or cut down the
trees, and set the bees to work again. If they still go forward, he goes
forward also and repeats his observations till the tree is found or till
the bees turn and come back upon the trail. Then he knows he has passed
the tree, and he retraces his steps to a convenient distance and tries
again, and thus quickly reduces the space to be looked over till the
swarm is traced home. On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where the
surface alternated between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick,
heavy growths of timber and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a
tempest tossed sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and
set them to work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet
distant. One would have expected them under such circumstances to have
gone straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but
they did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude
above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled me for
hours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with the woods only
from the top side,