Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/241

Rh eat that stuff. To see it hanging, sugar-bags full, in the sun, with all the flies in creation fighting for a footing—white comb, black comb, and breeding comb jammed into the same old sack! I'd as soon eat macaroni, after seeing it hang like hurdles in all the dirty narrow streets of Naples, as touch your bush-honey! But I thought my education would be incomplete if I did not just for once see them 'take the bees.'

"The way they found the hive struck my fancy. You know that little black boy, Barry, that's always cutting about. He watches, it appears, the bees going to the water-hole to drink, or get mud for their comb. He catches a bee, twines a bit of wool or silkworm fluff about its body. Off it starts for home, black boy after it. Over logs, round bushes; he never takes his eyes from the sailing piece of wool. 'The Quest of the Golden Honey Fleece' you might call it. Miles away it may be, he observes the creature fly at length into the hollow of some lofty tree, through a crevice made by a broken bough. He 'blazes' that tree with his tommy—or billy, which is it?—and the next night 'lays the fellows on.' The biggest bit of comb they give him for his pains. They have three buckets full of the ambrosia-of-the-bush to-night. They are going to 'Italianize' the swarm, and set them up afresh on the bee-farm in the ranges.

"Bees, however," he continued, as he made a vigorous onslaught on his left arm, crunching an unfortunate captive, "are not the only creatures that carry honey in their mouths—or legs, is it?—and a sting on their tongue—or wherever they carry their arms.

"When the men had the tree down—didn't it topple with a crash!—I chased a juvenile 'possum perched on the back of its ma. She had experienced, painfully, the