quality of the booty would also betray it. No doubt, also, there are
plenty of gossips about a hive that note and tell everything. "Oh, did
you see that? Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago in great haste, and
one of the up-stairs packers says she was loaded till she groaned with
apple-blossom honey which she deposited, and then rushed off again
like mad. Apple-blossom honey in October! Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smell
something! Let's after."

In about half an hour we have three well-defined lines of bees
established--two to farm-houses and one to the woods, and our box is
being rapidly depleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes to the
woods, and now that they have learned the way thoroughly they do not
make the long preliminary whirl above the box, but start directly from
it. The woods are rough and dense and the hill steep, and we do not like
to follow the line of bees until we have tried at least to settle the
problem as to the distance they go into the woods-whether the tree is on
this side of the ridge or in the depth of the forest on the other side.
So we shut up the box when it is full of bees and carry it about
three hundred yards along the wall from which we are operating. When
liberated, the bees, as they always will in such cases, go off in the
same directions they have been going; they do not seem to know that they
have been moved. But other bees have followed our scent, and it is not
many minutes before a second line to the woods is established. This is
called cross-lining the bees. The new line makes a sharp angle with the
other line, and we know at once that the tree is only a few rods
into the woods. The two lines we have established form two sides of a
triangle of which the wall is the base; at the apex of the triangle, or
where the two lines meet in the woods, we are sure to find the tree. We
quickly follow up these lines, and where they cross each other on the
side of the hill we scan every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an
oak and examine a hole near the root; now the bees are in this tree and
their entrance is on the upper side near the ground, not two feet from
the hole I peer into, and yet so quiet and secret is their going and
coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up the hill. Failing in
this direction, I return to the oak again, and then perceive the bees
going out in a small crack in the tree. The bees do not know they are
found out and that the game is in our hands, and are a