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. That every new
swarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact
that they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an
enterprise, and that a passing cloud or a sudden wind, after the bees
are in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive.
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