n of the
colony, the state of the weather, the time of the season, the
little-understood laws of the honey-flow,--these singly, and often all
in combination, make the wisest handling of a colony of bees a question
fresh every summer morning and new every evening.

For bees should be "handled," that is, bees left to their own devices
may make you a little honey--ten to thirty pounds in the best of
seasons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily make you three
hundred pounds of pure comb honey--food of prophets, and with saleratus
biscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the sons of prophets
here on Mullein Hill.

Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey? Not often, for it is only rarely
that the colony can be built up to a strength sufficient to store this
earliest flow. But I have sometimes caught it; and then as the season
advances, and flow after flow comes on with the breaking of the great
floral waves, I get other flavors,--pure white clover, wild raspberry,
golden sumac, pearly white clethra, buckwheat, black as axle grease,
and last of all, the heavy, rich yellow of the goldenrod. These, by
careful watching, I get pure and true to flavor like so many fruit
extracts at the soda fountains.

Then sometimes the honey for a whole season will be adulterated, not by
anything that I have done, but by the season's peculiar conditions, or
by purely local conditions,--conditions that may not prevail in the
next town at all.

One year it began in the end of July. The white clover flow was over
and the bees were beginning to work upon the earliest blossoms of the
dwarf sumac. Sitting in front of the hives soon after the renewed
activity commenced, I noticed a peculiarly rank odor on the air, and
saw that the bees in vast numbers were rising and making for a pasture
somewhere over the sprout-land that lay to the north of the hives. Yet
I felt sure there was nothing in blossom in that direction within range
of my bees (they will fly off two miles for food); nothing but dense
hardwood undergrowth from stumps cut some few years before.

Marking their line of flight I started into the low jungle to find
them. I was half a mile in when I caught the busy hum of wings. I
looked but could see nothing,--not a flower of any sort, nothing but
oak, maple, birch, and young pine saplings just a little higher than my
head. But the air was full of bees; yet not of swarming bees, for that
is a different and unmistakable