Like Honey?

George Harold Edgell spends his working hours in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, of which he is director. In his spare time, spruce, 62-year-old Edgell practices a rare and, he fears, a vanishing skill: hunting the wild bee.* Last week, in a pithy little book, The Bee Hunter (Harvard University Press; $2.50), he let the rest of the U.S. in on his secrets.

With 53 years of experience chasing bees, Edgell has no patience with dilettantes who merely think they know how to do it. Articles on bee hunting, says he, have one thing in common: "They are written by men who never possibly could have found a bee tree, at least by pursuing the methods they describe." Sample fallacies: a handkerchief soaked in anise will induce bees to point the way to their hive (actually they will shun the lure); a "beeline" home is straight (it is really erratic because "no two bees have exactly the same idea as to the best way home").

Take a Small Box. What the bee hunter needs first of all, says Edgell, is a small, double-chambered, glass-windowed box with a hinged lid ("One's first task is to catch a bee"). In the box he places an empty honeycomb which he fills with sugar syrup just before he goes into action.

The experienced hunter brings his trap box up sharply under a sitting bee, e.g., one busy on a milkweed bloom, and slaps the lid home as "he" tumbles in. (Edgell explains curtly: "There is nothing feminine about a working bee but its anatomy. 'She' is 'he' to me.") This bee and about a dozen more are maneuvered into the rear chamber of the box.

When the bees are released, they will (usually) take the sugar syrup home to the hive in the tree. If luck is with the hunter, they will bring comrades back to help carry the rest of the free lunch. When dozens or hundreds of bees are making the trip, the hunter can set his beeline in the right direction.

Paint One Blue. The next step is to estimate the distance by timing the round trip of an individual bee (a worker bee flies about 15 m.p.h,). To do this, one particular bee has to be marked. Hunter Edgell does it by selecting a bee which has worked its way into a cell of the comb and is relatively immune to outside distractions. Then he daubs its rear with blue paint (made from carpenter's chalk and water). On the next trip, the blue-bottomed bee stands out from its fellows.

The hunter knows at an early stage approximately where the tree is. To get a better fix, he moves his box, one or more times, closer to the supposed location. Usually, traffic on the beeline gets thicker & thicker as he nears the hive tree.

Bring a Tub. When the tree is found, it is marked. Then, in October, when the bees have stored all the honey they are going to for the season, the tree is cut down, or, as bee hunters say, "taken up." Bring a tub, advises Edgell. "The humiliation of returning [with the tub nearly empty] is as nothing compared to the exasperation of filling a couple of buckets and finding that you have no way of transporting the rest ..." His best haul: 97 Ibs. of honey from one tree.

Author Edgell concedes that in taking up a tree, even with veils, gloves and smudges, a sting'or two must be expected. But he loves wild honey.

*The honey bee (Apis mellifera and kindred species) is not native to the U.S., but many fugitives from domestic hives have taken to the woods.

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