Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

An experiment was once made to see how fast a bee could fly. The hive was attached to the roof of a train which attained a speed of 30 miles an hour before the bee was left behind.

One of the “industries” of Florida is hunting “bee trees” in the swamps. As high as 300 pounds of honey have been found in one hollow tree. The trees are located by the hunters who follow the flight of bees, and the requisites are a keen eyesight and a reliable compass.

“Uncle Bill” Murphy, One of the Quaint Characters of the State.

One of the quaint characters of Saginaw, Mich., is “Uncle bill” McMurphy, the bee wizard, who has netted a snug little fortune gathering wild honey from the woods of Saginaw county. For upward of forty years this strange old man has roamed the forests and wild lands of the valley, spending the golden autumn days in the solitude of the woods and wild flowers spying upon the secret hiding place of the bees’ hard-earned treasure. The trade of a bee hunter seems a very peculiar one, almost an irksome task, but Mr. McMurphy has plied it until he has reduced it to a science, and each season’s work generally averages him from1,200 to 1, 500 pounds of strained honey. Some years he has done even better than this and prepared for market over a ton of the saccharine product. By an actual record of each year’s yield for the past forty years, which ended on Nov. 15 last, Mr. McMurphy had gathered a trifle over twenty-six tons of wild bee honey.

When the bee-hunting operations begin in the fall it is with great difficulty that the hunter succeeds in attracting the busy insects from the rich wild flowers to the bee box, a small wooden structure arranged in compartments, with tiny glass windows-which is in truth a snare or trap. This trap is baited, with a sweet, highly scented mixture, which contains a drug that partially stupefies the bees and renders the labor of following them to the bee tree less difficult. After the insects have once tasted the alluring mixture in the box they lose all appetite for the sweets of the wild flowers, and after loading up on the mixture in the box fly sluggishly to their tree, where they discharge their load and return directly to the box, bringing other bees with them. When the hunter has the bees working on the box it takes but a short time to locate the tree where the honey is being stored up. As a bee leaves the box he watches the direction of his flight. If the bee tree is a mile or so away upon leaving the box the bee rises perpendicularly to a height of forty feet, then heads directly for his tree, but if the tree is but a few rods away from the box the bee leaves the snare leisurely, in a diagonal manner, but directly toward the tree, for invariably the bees fly “as The crow flies.” The hunter watches their flight, then takes his box and follows upon their trail from forty to eighty rods. The box is again uncovered and the process is repeated, and so on until the line takes him to the base of the honey bee tree.