and from the air above they recognize home only by
land-marks here, and in every instance they rise aloft to take their
bearings. Think how familiar to them the topography of the forest
summits must be-an umbrageous sea or plain where every mask and point is
known.

Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a bee-tree
sooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are only a few
yards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in the near at
hand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant field, they are
lured by the remote and the difficult, and hence overlook the flower and
the sweet at their very door. On several occasions I have unwittingly
set my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and waited long for bees
without getting them, when, on removing to a distant field or opening in
the woods I have got a clew at once.

I have a theory that when bees leave the hive, unless there is some
special attraction in some other direction, they generally go against
the wind. They would thus have the wind with them when they returned
home heavily laden, and with these little navigators the difference
is an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a great
hindrance, but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with more ease.
Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as ballast, but their only ballast
is their honey bag. Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to
windward of the woods in which the swarm is supposed to have taken
refuge.

Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do water their
honey, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then of course thicker
and sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence, old bee-hunters look for
bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the woods. I once found a
tree a long distance from any water, and the honey had a peculiar bitter
flavor imparted to it, I was convinced, by rainwater sucked from the
decayed and spongy hemlock tree, in which the swarm was found. In
cutting into the tree, the north side of it was found to be saturated
with water like a spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a bitter
flavor. The bees had thus found a spring or a cistern in their own
house.

Bees are exposed to many hardships and many dangers. Winds and storms
prove as disastrous to them as to other navigators. Black spiders lie in
wait for them as do brigands for travelers. One day as I was looking for
a bee amid some golden-rod, I spied