Page:How to Keep Bees.djvu/263

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BEE-HUNTING
213

visitor came back soon, and especially if she was followed by her anxious sisters, we were satisfied. With several bees flying in the same direction, it was always easy to get the "line," which we marked by some peculiar tree or other noticeable object in the landscape. When several of our visitors were eagerly filling themselves with honey, the cover was shoved over them and they were carried for a distance along the line and then liberated, and the line from this new location ascertained. Thus were they followed, up hill and down dale, and even through woodlands; finally, we would come to a place in a forest where we could follow the line no farther, and then we took our first lesson in geometry by getting a cross-line. This was done by carrying some of the bees in the box for some rods to the right or left; and when they were established there we knew that at the apex of the angle made by the two intersecting lines stood the bee-tree.

The triumph which filled us when we finally discovered that stream of black particles entering some knothole or the broken top of a tree, made us breathless; and all the way home we tried to temper our excitement so as to make the announcement of our discovery with a nonchalance characteristic of invariably successful hunters.

However, we were by no means always successful. Sometimes it would be too late in the day before we established a line; and again a line would lead us in a disgusting fashion to some unsuspected apiary; and now and then in a woodland tangle