Bee hunting is the sport of finding wild colonies of honeybees. You usually start by catching a half-dozen or so worker bees inside a small contraption called a “bee box.” Next, you tuck a small square of comb filled with sugar syrup inside this box. Once the boxed-up bees have found your comb and have loaded up on your syrup, you release them to determine the compass bearing of their “bee line,” that is, the direction in which they fly home. Finally, you move the syrup-filled comb, along with some of the bees, step-by-step down their bee line until you locate their nest, usually in a hollow tree. (Here’s a demonstration of this process)
Like most forms of hunting, bee hunting is a seasonal sport. It typically runs from mid-spring until mid-autumn, those times of the year when you can find bees on flowers. Given this limitation, I hesitated when the Northern Woodlands staff invited me to present a workshop on bee hunting at their conference this past October. By the middle of October, heavy frosts have usually killed off the flowers in central Vermont. Heck, by the middle of October there can be heavy snowstorms in central Vermont.
Despite my misgivings, I said yes. I did so partly because I figured that I could always present an indoor talk about bee hunting if the weather prevented an outdoor demonstration of the craft. I also recalled reading about an old method for establishing bee lines out of season. Bee Hunting, by John R. Lockard, was published in 1908. In Chapter Seven, Lockard recalls his experiences accompanying an “old hunter” on cool weather bee hunts. They would place moistened honeycomb on fire-heated flat stones. As the honeycomb cooked, its aroma attracted bees, and Lockard and his friend would observe the return direction of the bees’ flight. In order to follow the bees and establish a line to the hive, they would repeat the process several times – either building a series of fires, or lugging hot rocks from the original fire over increasing distances.
There were risks to this method:
Sometimes stones of a slatey nature would be heated and when becoming quite hot would burst with a loud report and fly in all directions. At that time I would just about as soon approach a loaded cannon.
As an alternative, Lockard recommended setting up a rig involving a pail, a pan, and a coal miner’s lamp fueled with alcohol.
I was intrigued by Lockard’s method, which jibed with what I knew about bee behavior during a nectar dearth: when nectar isn’t available from flowers, bees will steal from neighbors’ unprotected honeycombs. The aroma released by heating honey must be a potent attractant for would-be robbers. So, my plan for the workshop was to burn honeycombs to attract bees, and if successful, conduct a full-on bee hunt.
I was lucky that Saturday, for although the morning was cold, the sun shone brightly and by the time I began my show-and-tell on bee hunting at 11:15, the air had warmed to nearly 60 degrees – a comfortable temperature for bee flight. Perfect! Step one was to explain the general process to my students, and then to light a little fire and start heating some beeswax comb and honey. But instead of using a flat rock set over a fire (which might explode), or an antique coal miner’s lamp, I built a little fire on a cast-iron griddle that I set atop an inverted trashcan. Once the fire was burning briskly, I laid two chunks of dark comb filled with crystallized honey on top. Soon, these beeswax combs were melting and the honey they held was bubbling. Alluring aromas of beeswax and honey filled the air.
To my surprise and delight, this technique for attracting bees worked beautifully. Within five minutes of putting the chunks of old comb on the burning wood, a bumblebee flew upwind to my smoky cornucopia. This bee landed without hesitation on a palm-size square of honeycomb that I had positioned on the cool end of the griddle.
The bumblebee’s rapid arrival showed that Lockard’s advice was not just hot air. This was demonstrated again five minutes later when a honeybee cautiously approached. Like the bumblebee, she flew upwind to the fire, but she was more wary, perhaps because she sensed instinctively that robbing is dangerous work. Eventually, after about eight minutes of cautiously circling the comb, she landed, inserted her tongue into an open cell of warm honey, and started to drink.
It was now about 12:30. I popped inside the conference dining hall to grab some lunch. When I returned to the feeding station some 20 minutes later, I was surprised to find 14 worker honeybees standing on the feeder comb, loading up on the warm honey. This told me it was time to start performing the standard protocol of a bee hunter: label with paint marks several bees for individual identification, note when the labeled individuals depart from and return to the feeder comb, and record the compass directions in which the bees fly home.
Within an hour, I knew that these bees were leaving for home on a bearing about 40 degrees east of north, and that the speediest individuals were taking only about four minutes to fly home, unload, and return to my comb. Great! I knew from previous studies (discussed in Chapter Five of my little book Following the Wild Bees) that these four-minute “away times” indicated that the bees’ home was only about 300 yards’ distance.
Knowing that the bees’ home was some 300 yards away in the direction 40° east of north, I deduced that they were living somewhere on a wooded hillside that rises steeply behind a cluster of cabins. Fortunately, the trees on this hillside are mostly large oaks, maples, and white pines. This meant that we might need to inspect only several dozen (not several hundred) trees to find the bees’ dwelling place.
Fortunately, too, I had a team of a dozen beginner bee hunters who were, like me, eager to find “our” bees’ home. I explained that our search procedure was simple: scan slowly and carefully up and down each side of each tree’s trunk, and out along its major limbs, looking for the traffic of bees flying to and from the entrance of their nest. This tree-by-tree search work requires patience, but because the human visual system is extremely good at detecting small objects moving rapidly against a stationary background, it is usually not super hard to spot the bees. This is especially true in early spring and autumn, when deciduous trees are bare of leaves.
After about 45 minutes of searching, I heard somebody shout, “found the bee tree!” A beekeeper couple from Massachusetts had discovered the bees zipping in and out of a knothole about 40 feet up on the south side of a handsome white oak.
Discovering this bee tree gave us all a feeling of triumph. Indeed, we had conducted this hunt in an almost record time – barely three hours. What I will remember most vividly from this hunt, however, is seeing the first two bees – a bumblebee and a honeybee – miraculously appear, without a flower in sight, lured by the irresistible scents of beeswax and honey swirling up from a fire.
Web Extras
The “Fired Up for Bee Hunting” article began as an email from Tom Seeley to Northern Woodlands’ Executive Director (and Tom Seeley superfan) Elise Tillinghast, following up on Tom’s experience at the annual October conference. The staff enjoyed Tom’s description of cold-weather bee lining, and Tom was kind enough to polish this into an article for inclusion in the spring magazine.
A few more images from the conference are included in this article that didn’t make it into the print magazine, taken by Tig Tillinghast: an image of burning honeycomb, and Tom with his cool-weather set up.
For anyone interested in reading the 1908 text referenced in Tom’s article, this is available on-line via Project Gutenberg. See in particular Chapter 7, “The Latest Improved Method of Burning.”
Tom is a staff favorite here at Northern Woodlands, and we’ve often pestered him for bee-related articles. See for example, the article on honeybee house hunting, and this fun Q&A with Tom and his wife, Dr. Robin Hadlock Seeley, whose research has included a focus on coastal marine ecosystems.