cells, the bees bite and pull and insult her as
before.

I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from
home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is; how
they come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees each
striving to get out first; it is as when the dam gives way and lets the
waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air,
and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye and a soft chorus
of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they drift,
now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick about
some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other point,
till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments the
whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps as
large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one to three or
four hours, or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up, when, if
they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up and
off. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen the enterprise
miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small pear-tree into
a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath the tree, and put
the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up into it, and all
seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I observed that
something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and to rush about
in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and all returned to
the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it the queen
with three or four other bees. She had been one of the first to fall,
had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it upon her. I conveyed
her tenderly back to the hive, but either the accident terminated
fatally with her or else the young queen had been liberated in the
interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it was ten days
before the swarm issued a second time.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the
woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and
incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature
and take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated.
Years upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no appreciable
effect towards their final, permanent domestication.