I have never heard any adequate explanation of this phenomenon. Some people say that persons having this power have a distinctive odor about them, which wasps and bees dislike, and others ascribe it only to an entire fearlessness and unconcern.
Sam Huntington, John’s younger brother, is a handsome, strong, slender-built fellow, taller than John and even darker. It was Sam who showed my father, one day out snipe shooting, what a _bee line_ really means, and how to take one, and find the bee-tree. You catch two wild bees, and attach a bit of cotton wool, big enough to mark the bee’s flight, to each; let the first bee go, getting the line of his flight well, then walk on two or three hundred yards, and let the second go, taking note equally carefully. Where the two lines intersect is the bee-tree and the hidden treasure of wild honey.
Sitting in Jacob Damren’s clover field one day, my father showed me how to find bumble-bee honey. We sat still, and watched the fat bee go his buzzing way from head to head of red clover. At last he had honey enough, and off he started on a swifter, straighter flight, but he was heavy with honey, and we could easily follow. He did not go far, but swung on a long slant to his hole in the ground. We dug where he entered (he emerged, part way through the process, very angry and buzzing) and about six inches down we found the honey cells. There was a lump or cluster of them, perhaps half as big as your hand. They were longer than the cells of honey bees; not hexagonal like these, but roughly cylindrical, dark brown, and full of very good, clear, dark brown honey.
Tresumpscott Pond is a great haunt of whippoorwills. As dusk begins to fringe the coverts of the wood, they begin their strange, almost ghostly chorus, like the swift whistling of a rod through the air, powerful and regular, “whip,” and “whip,” and “whip” again, answering each other all night. I noticed the time of their first notes, one night in early July. The voices of the veeries fell away, and then stopped, at quarter past eight, and at quarter of nine the first whippoorwill struck up, and was instantly answered. (I have known them to begin sharp at eight o’clock, or even earlier.)