Books: The Writings of John Burroughs
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The honey-bees that licked up our leavings on the old stub belonged
to a swarm, as it proved, about half a mile farther down the ridge,
and a few days afterward fate overtook them, and their stores in
turn became the prey of another swarm in the vicinity, which also
tempted Providence and were overwhelmed. The first-mentioned swarm
I had lined from several points, and was following up the clew over
rocks and through gullies, when I came to where a large hemlock had
been felled a few years before, and a swarm taken from a cavity
near the top of it; fragments of the old comb were yet to be seen.
A few yards away stood another short, squatty hemlock, and I said
my bees ought to be there. As I paused near it, I noticed where
the tree had been wounded with an axe a couple of feet from the
ground many years before. The wound had partially grown over, but
there was an opening there that I did not see at the first glance.
I was about to pass on when a bee passed me making that peculiar
shrill, discordant hum that a bee makes when besmeared with honey.
I saw it alight in the partially closed wound and crawl home; then
came others and others, little bands and squads of them, heavily
freighted with honey from the box. The tree was about twenty
inches through and hollow at the butt, or from the axe-mark down.
This space the bees had completely filled with honey. With an axe
we cut away the outer ring of live wood and exposed the treasure.
Despite the utmost care, we wounded the comb so that little rills
of the golden liquid issued from the root of the tree and trickled
down the hill.
The other bee-tree in the vicinity to which I have referred we
found one warm November day in less than half an hour after
entering the woods. It also was a hemlock, that stood in a niche
in a wall of hoary, moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree
hardly reached to the top of the precipice. The bees entered a
small hole at the root, which was seven or eight feet from the
ground. The position was a striking one. Never did apiary have a
finer outlook or more rugged surroundings.. A black, wood-embraced
lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of the Catskills filled the
far distance, and the more broken outlines of the Shawangunk range
filled the rear. On every hand were precipices and a wild
confusion of rocks and trees.
The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a half
long and eight or ten inches in diameter. With an axe we cut away
one side of the tree, and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of
honey. It was a most pleasing sight. What winding and devious
ways the bees had through their palace! What great masses and
blocks of snow-white comb there were! Where it was sealed up,
presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface, it looked like
some precious ore. When we carried a large pailful of it out of
the woods, it seemed still more like ore.
Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of the tree by the
time the bee occupies in making its first trip. But this is no
certain guide. You are always safe in calculating that the tree is
inside of a mile, and you need not as a rule look for your bee's
return under ten minutes. One day I picked up a bee in an opening
in the woods and gave it honey, and it made three trips to my box
with an interval of about twelve minutes between them; it returned
alone each time; the tree, which I afterward found, was about half
a mile distant.
In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter are to
pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or cut
down the trees, and set the bees to work again. If they still go
forward, he goes forward also, and repeats his observations till
the tree is found, or till the bees turn and come back upon the
trail. Then he knows he has passed the tree, and he retraces his
steps to a convenient distance and tries again, and thus quickly
reduces the space to be looked over till the swarm is traced home.
On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where the surface alternated
between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick, heavy growths of
timber, and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest-tossed
sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and set them to
work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet distant.
One would have expected them under such circumstances to have gone
straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but they
did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude
above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled me
for hours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with the
woods only from the top side, and from the air above; they
recognize home only by landmarks here, and in every instance they
rise aloft to take their bearings. Think how familiar to them the
topography of the forest summits must be,--an umbrageous sea or
plain where every mark and point is known.
Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a bee-
tree sooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are only
a few yards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in the
near at hand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant field,
they are lured by the remote and the difficult, and hence overlook
the flower and the sweet at their very door. On several occasions
I have unwittingly set my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and
waited long for bees without getting them, when, on removing to a
distant field or opening in the woods, I have got a clew at once.
I have a theory that when bees leave the hive, unless there is some
special attraction in some other direction, they generally go
against the wind. They would thus have the wind with them when they
returned home heavily laden, and with these little navigators the
difference is an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-
wind is a great hindrance, but fresh and empty-handed, they can
face it with more ease. Virgil says bees bear gravel-stones as
ballast, but their only ballast is their honey-bag. Hence, when I
go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to windward of the woods in which
the swarm is supposed to have 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.
I once found a tree a long distance from any water, and the honey
had a peculiar bitter flavor, imparted to it, I was convinced, by
rainwater sucked from the decayed and spongy hemlock-tree in which
the swarm was found. In cutting into the tree, the north side of
it was found to be saturated with water like a spring, which ran
out in big drops, and had a bitter flavor. The bees had thus found
a spring or a cistern in their own house.
Bees are exposed to many hardships and many dangers. Winds and
storms prove as disastrous to them as to other navigators. Black
spiders lie in wait for them as do brigands for travelers. One
day, as I was looking for a bee amid some golden-rod, I spied one
partly concealed under a leaf. Its baskets were full of pollen,
and it did not move. On lifting up the leaf I discovered that a
hairy spider was ambushed there and had the bee by the throat. The
vampire was evidently afraid of the bee's sting, and was holding it
by the throat till quite sure of its death. Virgil speaks of the
painted lizard, perhaps a species of salamander, as an enemy of the
honey-bee. We have no lizard that destroys the bee; but our tree-
toad, ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms, snaps them up
wholesale. Quick as lightning that subtle but clammy tongue darts
forth, and the unsuspecting bee is gone. Virgil also accuses the
titmouse and the woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and our
kingbird has been charged with the like crime, but the latter
devours only the drones. The workers are either too small and
quick for it or else it dreads their sting.
Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the
honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth
Georgic. If he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an
apiary, it is hard to see how he could have believed that the bee
in its flight abroad carried a gravel-stone for ballast:
"And as when empty barks on billows
float,
With sandy ballast sailors trim the
boat;
So bees bear gravel-stones, whose
poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds
their steady flight;"
or that, when two colonies made war upon each other, they issued
forth from their hives led by their kings and fought in the air,
strewing the ground with the dead and dying:--
"Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the
plain,
Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of
acorns rain."
It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had, we
should have had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that
bees sometimes escaped to the woods:--
"Nor bees are lodged in hives alone,
but found
In chambers of their own beneath the
ground:
Their vaulted roofs are hung in
pumices,
And in the rotten trunks of hollow
trees."
Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their
brothers in the hive. The only difference is, that wild honey is
flavored with your adventure, which makes it a little more
delectable than the domestic article.
IV
NATURE AND THE POETS
I HAVE said on a former occasion that "the true poet knows more
about Nature than the naturalist, because he carries her open
secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe in
ornithology, but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning
and mystery of the bird?" But the poets sometimes rely too
confidently upon their supposed intuitive knowledge of nature, and
grow careless about the accuracy of the details of their pictures.
I am not aware that this was ever the case with Goethe; I think it
was not, for as a rule, the greater the poet, the more correct and
truthful will be his specifications. It is the lesser poets who
trip most over their facts. Thus a New England poet speaks of
"plucking the apple from the pine," as if the pineapple grew upon
the pine-tree. A Western poet sings of the bluebird in a strain in
which every feature and characteristic of the bird is lost; not one
trait of the bird is faithfully set down. When the robin and the
swallow come, he says, the bluebird hies him to some mossy old
wood, where, amid the deep seclusion, he pours out his song.
In a poem by a well-known author in one of the popular journals, a
hummingbird's nest is shown the reader, and it has BLUE eggs in it.
A more cautious poet would have turned to Audubon or Wilson before
venturing upon such a statement. But then it was necessary to have
a word to rhyme with "view," and what could be easier than to make
a white egg "blue"? Again, one of our later poets has evidently
confounded the hummingbird with that curious parody upon it, the
hawk or sphinx moth, as in his poem upon the subject he has hit off
exactly the habits of the moth, or, rather, his creature seems a
cross between the moth and the bird, as it has the habits of the
one and the plumage of the other. The time to see the hummingbird,
he says, is after sunset in the summer gloaming; then it steals
forth and hovers over the flowers. Now, the hummingbird is
eminently a creature of the sun and of the broad open day, and I
have never seen it after sundown, while the moth is rarely seen
except at twilight. It is much smaller and less brilliant than the
hummingbird; but its flight and motions are so nearly the same that
a poet, with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, might easily mistake
one for the other. It is but a small slip in such a poet as poor
George Arnold, when he makes the sweet-scented honeysuckle bloom
for the bee, for surely the name suggests the bee, though in fact
she does not work upon it; but what shall we say of the Kansas
poet, who, in his published volume, claims both the yew and the
nightingale for his native State? Or of a Massachusetts poet, who
finds the snowdrop and the early primrose blooming along his native
streams, with the orchis and the yellow violet, and makes the
blackbird conspicuous among New England songsters? Our ordinary
yew is not a tree at all, but a low spreading evergreen shrub that
one may step over; and as for the nightingale, if they have the
mockingbird in Kansas, they can very well do without him. We have
several varieties of blackbirds, it is true; but when an American
poet speaks in a general way of the blackbird piping or singing in
a tree, as he would speak of a robin or a sparrow, the suggestion
or reminiscence awakened is always that of the blackbird of English
poetry.
"In days when daisies deck the ground,
And blackbirds whistle clear,
With honest joy our hearts will bound
To see the coming year"--
sings Burns. I suspect that the English reader of even some of
Emerson's and Lowell's poems would infer that our blackbird was
identical with the British species. I refer to these lines of
Emerson:--
"Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbirds' roundelay;"
and to these lines from Lowell's "Rosaline:"--
"A blackbird whistling overhead
Thrilled through my brain;"
and again these from "The Fountain of Youth:"--
" 'T is a woodland enchanted;
By no sadder spirit
Than blackbirds and thrushes
That whistle to cheer it,
All day in the bushes."
The blackbird of the English poets is like our robin in everything
except color. He is familiar, hardy, abundant, thievish, and his
habits, manners, and song recall our bird to the life. Our own
native blackbirds, the crow blackbird, the rusty grackle, the
cowbird, and the red-shouldered starling, are not songsters, even
in the latitude allowable to poets; neither are they whistlers,
unless we credit them with a "split-whistle," as Thoreau does. The
two first named have a sort of musical cackle and gurgle in spring
(as at times both our crow and jay have), which is very pleasing,
and to which Emerson aptly refers in these lines from "May-Day:"--
"The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee"--
but it is not a song. The note of the starling in the trees and
alders along the creeks and marshes is better calculated to arrest
the attention of the casual observer; but it is far from being a
song or a whistle like that of the European blackbird, or our
robin. Its most familiar call is like the word "BAZIQUE,"
"BAZIQUE," but it has a wild musical note which Emerson has
embalmed in this line:--
"The redwing flutes his O-KA-LEE."
Here Emerson discriminates; there is no mistaking his blackbird
this time for the European species, though it is true there is
nothing fluty or flute-like in the redwing's voice. The flute is
mellow, while the "O-KA-LEE" of the starling is strong and sharply
accented. The voice of the thrushes (and our robin and the European
blackbird are thrushes) is flute-like. Hence the aptness of this
line of Tennyson:--
"The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm,"--
the blackbird being the ouzel, or ouzel-cock, as Shakespeare calls
him.
In the line which precedes this, Tennyson has stamped the cuckoo:--
"To left and right,
The cuckoo told his name to all the
hills."
The cuckoo is a bird that figures largely in English poetry, but he
always has an equivocal look in American verse, unless sharply
discriminated. We have a cuckoo, but he is a great recluse; and I
am sure the poets do not know when he comes or goes, while to make
him sing familiarly like the British species, as I have known at
least one of our poets to do, is to come very wide of the mark.
Our bird is as solitary and joyless as the most veritable
anchorite. He contributes nothing to the melody or the gayety of
the season. He is, indeed, known in some sections as the rain-
crow," but I presume that not one person in ten of those who spend
their lives in the country has ever seen or heard him. He is like
the showy orchis, or the lady's-slipper, or the shooting star among
plants,-- a stranger to all but the few; and when an American poet
says cuckoo, he must say it with such specifications as to leave no
doubt what cuckoo he means, as Lowell does in his "Nightingale in
the Study:"--
"And, hark, the cuckoo, weatherwise,
Still hiding farther onward, wooes
you."
In like manner the primrose is an exotic in American poetry, to say
nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy. Its prominence in English
poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so
abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early
and is very pretty. Cowslip and oxlip are familiar names of
varieties of the same plant, and they bear so close a resemblance
that it is hard to tell them apart. Hence Tennyson, in "The
Talking Oak:"--
"As cowslip unto oxlip is,
So seems she to the boy."
Our familiar primrose is the evening primrose,--a rank, tall weed
that blooms with the mullein in late summer. Its small, yellow,
slightly fragrant blossoms open only at night, but remain open
during the next day. By cowslip, our poets and writers generally
mean the yellow marsh marigold, which belongs to a different family
of plants, but which, as a spring token and a pretty flower, is a
very good substitute for the cowslip. Our real cowslip, the
shooting star, is very rare, and is one of the most beautiful of
native flowers. I believe it is not found north of Pennsylvania.
I have found it in a single locality in the District of Columbia,
and the day is memorable upon which I first saw its cluster of pink
flowers, with their recurved petals cleaving the air. I do not
know that it has ever been mentioned in poetry.
Another flower, which I suspect our poets see largely through the
medium of English literature and invest with borrowed charms, is
the violet. The violet is a much more winsome and poetic flower in
England than it is in this country, for the reason that it comes
very early and is sweet-scented; our common violet is not among the
earliest flowers, and it is odorless. It affects sunny slopes,
like the English flower; yet Shakespeare never could have made the
allusion to it which he makes to his own species in these lines:--
"That strain again! it had a dying fall:
Oh! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor,"
or lauded it as
"Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath."
Our best known sweet-scented violet is a small, white, lilac-veined
species (not yellow, as Bryant has it in his poem), that is common
in wet, out-of-the-way places. Our common blue violet--the only
species that is found abundantly everywhere in the North--blooms in
May, and makes bright many a grassy meadow slope and sunny nook.
Yet, for all that, it does not awaken the emotion in one that the
earlier and more delicate spring flowers do,--the hepatica, say,
with its shy wood habits, its pure, infantile expression, and at
times its delicate perfume; or the houstonia,--"innocence,"--
flecking or streaking the cold spring earth with a milky way of
minute stars; or the trailing arbutus, sweeter scented than the
English violet, and outvying in tints Cytherea's or any other
blooming goddess's cheek. Yet these flowers have no classical
associations, and are consequently far less often upon the lips of
our poets than the violet.
To return to birds, another dangerous one for the American poet is
the lark, and our singers generally are very shy of him. The term
has been applied very loosely in this country to both the meadow-
lark and the bobolink, yet it is pretty generally understood now
that we have no genuine skylark east of the Mississippi. Hence I
am curious to know what bird Bayard Taylor refers to when he speaks
in his "Spring Pastoral" of
"Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the
bluebird."
Our so-called meadowlark is no lark at all, but a starling, and the
titlark and shore lark breed and pass the summer far to the north,
and are never heard in song in the United States. [Footnote: The
shore lark has changed its habits in this respect of late years.
It now breeds regularly on my native hills in Delaware County, New
York, and may be heard in full song there from April to June or
later.]
The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but they must be
accurate when they particularize. We expect them to see the fact
through their imagination, but it must still remain a fact; the
medium must not distort it into a lie. When they name a flower or
a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they throw around it,
it must not be made to belie the botany or the natural history. I
doubt if you can catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this
respect, except where he followed the superstition and the
imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his treatment of the honey-
bee. His allusions to nature are always incidental to his main
purpose, but they reveal a careful and loving observer. For
instance, how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage, put into
the mouth of Banquo!--
"This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does
approve,
By his loved masonry that the
heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze.
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but
this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and
procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt,
I have observed,
The air is delicate."
Nature is of course universal, but in the same sense is she local
and particular,--cuts every suit to fit the wearer, gives every
land an earth and sky of its own, and a flora and fauna to match.
The poets and their readers delight in local touches. We have both
the hare and the rabbit in America, but this line from Thomson's
description of a summer morning,--
"And from the bladed field the fearful
hare limps awkward,"--
or this from Beattie,--
"Through rustling corn the hare
astonished sprang"--
would not apply with the same force in New England, because our
hare is never found in the fields, but in dense, remote woods. In
England both hares and rabbits abound to such an extent that in
places the fields and meadows swarm with them, and the ground is
undermined by their burrows, till they become a serious pest to the
farmer, and are trapped in vast numbers. The same remark applies
to this from Tennyson:--
"From the woods
Came voices of the well-contented
doves."
Doves and wood-pigeons are almost as abundant in England as hares
and rabbits, and are also a serious annoyance to the farmer; while
in this country the dove and pigeon are much less marked and
permanent features in our rural scenery,--less permanent, except in
the case of the mourning dove, which is found here and there the
season through; and less marked, except when the hordes of the
passenger pigeon once in a decade or two invade the land, rarely
tarrying longer than the bands of a foraging army. I hardly know
what Trowbridge means by the "wood-pigeon" in his midsummer poem,
for, strictly speaking, the wood-pigeon is a European bird, and a
very common one in England. But let me say here, however, that
Trowbridge, as a rule, keeps very close to the natural history of
his own country when he has occasion to draw material from this
source, and to American nature generally. You will find in his
poems the wood pewee, the bluebird, the oriole, the robin, the
grouse, the kingfisher, the chipmunk, the mink, the bobolink, the
wood thrush, all in their proper places. There are few bird-poems
that combine so much good poetry and good natural history as his
"Pewee." Here we have a glimpse of the catbird:--
"In the alders, dank with noonday
dews,
The restless catbird darts and mews;"
here, of the cliff swallow: -
"In the autumn, when the hollows
All are filled with flying leaves
And the colonies of swallows
Quit the quaintly stuccoed eaves."
Only the dates are not quite right. The swallows leave their nests
in July, which is nearly three months before the leaves fall. The
poet is also a little unfaithful to the lore of his boyhood when he
says
"The partridge beats his throbbing drum"
in midsummer. As a rule, the partridge does not drum later than
June, except fitfully during the Indian summer, while April and May
are his favorite months. And let me say here, for the benefit of
the poets who do not go to the woods, that the partridge does not
always drum upon a log; he frequently drums upon a rock or a stone
wall, if a suitable log be not handy, and no ear can detect the
difference. His drum is really his own proud breast, and beneath
his small hollow wings gives forth the same low, mellow thunder
from a rock as from a log. Bryant has recognized this fact in one
of his poems.
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