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Updated: May 11, 2025
He could still, by the aid of paper on his rifle sights, bring down an occasional turkey; at the salt licks, he still waylaid the deer; and he found and cut down bee-trees as readily as in his morning days. Never was old age more green, or gray hairs more graceful. His high, calm, bold forehead seemed converted by years, into iron.
While honey-bees and wasps can make themselves most disagreeable when disturbed, you can usually keep away from beehives and bee-trees as well as from the great gray, papery nests of the wasp; but the hornets or yellow-jackets have an uncomfortable habit of building in low bushes and on the ground where you may literally put your foot in a hornets' nest.
He could make a lye-leach, knew that it was lucky to set hens on thirteen eggs, realized that hens' eggs hatched in three weeks, and ducks' in four. He knew when the berries ripened, where the crows nested, and could find the bee-trees by watching the flight of the bees after they had gotten their fill on the basswood-blossoms.
The leaves of the walnut are gracefully arranged, but they admit too much light; while the tulip presents grand masses of dense foliage upheld by knotty, big-veined branches, the perfect embodiment of vigor. In the days of bee-hunting in the West, I may safely say that a majority of bee-trees were tulips.
In the Northern States these swarms very often perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seem to multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wild honey is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed not long since, that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled a tree that had several pailfuls in it.
Instead he only replied: "I don't know whether there are bee-trees around here now or not. I used to find a good deal of wild honey over at a place that I spoke of casually as Mount Hymettus, and was much surprised later to find they had so put it down on the maps of this region. Wild honey is delectable, but I pursued that subject till I sucked it dry.
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.
All this would be very easily done. But how were bee-trees found? That was the puzzle; for, as I have before observed, these trees do not differ in appearance from others around them; and the hole by which the bees enter is usually so high up, that one cannot see these little insects from the ground.
Our Indian guide had joined us at an early hour, and after conducting us carefully out of the wood, and pointing out to us numerous bee-trees, for which he said that grove was famous, he set off at a long trot, and about nine o'clock brought us to Piché's, a log cabin on a rising ground, looking off over the broad prairie to the east.
What a path that was! Beaten smooth with the passing of many bare feet, it wound through the brush and round the big pines, past the haunts of squirrels, black, gray, and red, past fox holes and woodchuck holes, under birds' nests and bee-trees, and best of all, it brought up at last at the Deep Hole, or "Deepole," as the boys called it.
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