The Sunday Herald
Sunday, March 28, 1897 Syracuse, New York

Strange Battle
Recalled by “Forty-niner”
of Cortland

And Told in His Own Words

Incident Brought to Mind by
Farmer Webster’s Bees.

Remarkable Conflict Between California
Honeybees and Yellow Jackets, Near
Vinegar Pond, Where Pickled
Cucumbers Grew.

Portland, March 27 – “I am astonished that there are so many educated people that never knew that honey bees would mate with lightning bugs until they read of a case of the kind that occurred in Trexton in last Sundays Hearald.” said an old California Forty-niner to a reporter for the Herald today.”
“It was common practice among bees and lightening bugs in California when I was there.” said he. “Off in the region where pickled cucumbers grew upon the vines and upon which we fatted and pickled pork on the hoof, as I told you a few weeks ago, and where the giant California trees grew, it was no uncommon thing for prospectors for gold to discover in the hollow of some of these gigantic trees immense swarms of bees that worked a night force who were provided with illuminating wings. In fact, it was necessary for such an economy among bees in that region in order to fill the hollows of these gigantic trees.

“I remember of finding a bee tree one day, the hollow of which was so large that you could easily have placed the Cortland Nominal school building within it, were it of a more oval shape. This hollow was filled with thousands of tons of the most delicious honey you ever tasted. There was a large stream of honey that flowed from a crack in this tree to a depression in the ground about an eight of a mile distant, forming a lake of pure honey that was several rods across. This lake was surrounded by hundreds of California bears that fattened on this honey. They would toil about Honey lake, as we called it, through the day, only leaving it long enough to visit Vinegar pond, a mile distant, to quench their inordinate thirst created by continually lapping honey from this lake. We were constantly supplied with the juiciest and most delicately flavored bear steaks from the bears we would shoot while on there way from Honey lake to Vinegar pond. These bears were very docile, as they were never hungry, and it was a common thing for members of our prospecting party to mingle with the bears at the lake side. They never offered to resent any intrusion from us; they were in fact less savage than so many fattening hogs.

“This particular variety of California bee is much larger than our bees. They average about the size of sparrows. The queen is as large as a robin. Not far from this particular bee tree was located an immense nest of yellow jackets, about the size of humming birds. This nest was suspended between two of the largest of the giant trees and was three or four times the size of the dome of the Capital at Washington, D.C. It was these yellow jackets that had created the crack in the bee tree, through which the honey flowed that created Honey lake. The yellow jackets drilled the crack with their stingers and thrived upon the honey that ran out until the bees organized a night attack on the yellow jackets nest.

Aerial Attack by Night.

“While in camp one night telling stories over our supper of broiled bear steak and delicious honey, with natural grown pickled cucumbers and pickled pigs feet fresh from the pen, we were startled by a terrific roaring that resembled the sound of a distant waterfall. We strengthened the fastenings of our tent and got inside, expecting a terrible storm to burst upon momentarily. After several minutes of suspense we ventured outside, and beheld in the distance the strangest sight imaginable. The night force of bees were all out and flying in regular line of battle, some fifty lines deep, I should judge. The constant flashes from their illuminated wings lighted the surrounding country for a half mile. You could see to read as plainly as under an electric light. The roaring sound created by their wings was what we had believed to be the warning of a great storm. We followed the direction the bees were taking and some came near the immense nest of yellow jackets suspended between the trees. The bees surrounded the yellow jacket citadel by the million and soon covered the entire outside until the dome like shape of the yellow jacket nest glowed with the constant flashing of the wings of the bees, making it resemble an immense ball of fire. The yellow jackets inside the nest were at the mercy of the bees, who tore large holes in the nest and stung to death the yellow jackets as fast as they were reached, and who were evidently bewildered by the flashing lights from the illuminated wings of the bees. The roaring sound created by the bees was augmented by that of the doomed yellow jackets.”

“The fight lasted approximately three hours and the next morning the ground was covered eight or ten feet deep with the dead bodies of the yellow jackets and bees for rods. The great dome like nest of the yellow jackets looked as though a cyclone had struck it. The bees had simply annihilated the yellow jackets, however, and had lost thousands of their own number as well.”
“The second day after the battle the stench that arose from the scene of conflict was so great that we were obliged to move our camp two miles away. I have never cared for honey since that time.”

Bees Bees Bees

Bees Bees Bees
These are native bees,
Not flies, not wasps, but bees,
Buzzing in the trees.
Flies have two wings,
Bees have four,
Bees are vegetarians
And wasps are carnivores,
Bees make honey
And pollinate flowers,
I could watch them
Buzz for hours.
Bees, bees, bees.

Thanks so much for your story. I love your connections with the past, your dreams and to “just Be(e)”! Very much in tune with the sentiments of this site. I wish you and all regular readers a very happy and successful 2011!

Beelore

From: ‘Pentonville’, Old and New London: Volume 2 (1878), pp. 279-289. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45098&strquery=hive Date accessed: 13 May 2010.

Obviously a not to be missed event!
Have a happy Birthday!
All the best to all
Archie

This is from a book of poems I’m working on entitled The Life of the Bee. Five of the poems, however, have been formed into an art song cycle in collaboration of the composer Lee Hoiby. You can hear some song samples here from a studio recording of our Carnegie Hall performance of 2001. The five poems in the cycle are: “Millennium Approaches” “Spirit of the Hive” “The Sting” “Ars Poetica: The Queen” and “The Swarm”.

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=60321&album_group=14

And here’s my web site where you can find out more about these poems and my work in general.
http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html

I hope your readers will enjoy.

from THE LIFE OF THE BEE
a work-in-progress
© 2010
by Jeffery Beam

after Maeterlinck

The flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollows; and love, love sang toward.
Theodore Roethke

We love the things we love for what they are. Robert Frost

For my exaggerations of the real toward the beautiful, I will not apologize. Allan Gurganus

Raise the great hem of the extended / World that nothing can leave.
Louis Zukofsky

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
Carl Jung

We are slowly losing the honey of the visible.
Rainer Maria Rilke

All born in the shadow of bombs / Shall become bombs.
Rashid Husain

A Nothing / we were, are now, and ever / shall be, blooming: /
The Nothing -, the / No-One’s-Rose.
Paul Celan

The interweaving of creatures with their emanations is creation.
We are simultaneously points of arrival and points of departure.
Victor Hugo

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
Alan Watts

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is mere appendix.
Sherlock Holmes

It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.
William Carlos Williams

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay
an invincible summer.
Albert Camus

MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

That the world is painfully beautiful painfully sad
That spent blossoms recall earth under which they once slept
Remembering air into which they now fall

THE SPIRIT OF THE HIVE

Back in the shaggy
underbelly
of the hive
in the quick amber
of the Queen’s chamber
the message
passes, testifies
phenomena of order.

Come. Come
with me to the sweet
chestnut flower,
the viola and the fox-
glove.
Finger and invade
the low-slung
swinging willow.

In circuitous dances
it tumbles:

the one prayer.
Before and after.
Precise as distance.

ARS POETICA: THE QUEEN

In collaboration with my others
I build this hive. As I am
Goddess, this, then, is my cathedral.
Built of wax and lives. Of light
and honey.
It grows around me.

My first sensation
was of yellow: a hum
forcing my skin to see.
Since then I have sung
the praises of this operation.
And counted the mysteries.
Storing my drooly jewels.

THE LAW OF LOVE
Act 1: At the gates

Winter over
workers invade once more
clover violets fragrant winter honeysuckle
holly

Thousands
Queen consorts incessantly birthed
crowd the city so

the worker hundreds cannot re-enter
Dying
at dusk’s gates

The old Queen’s
fruitfulness brings
tribulation sorrow

Spirit through her larger than she
mother of all love’s agent
counts the flowers
counts births
instructs her to depart
compels her to birth rival progeny
rear them royally
permits firstborn princesses to slay cradled sisters
workers to slaughter imperial brood

Foolish clumsy useless whirring creatures
pretentious gluttonous dirty coarse
scandalously idle
insatiable overgrown
for them too the Spirit comes for massacre
when flowers began to open
close sooner

Men’s wars more seditious cruel
are they less purposeful
what larger spirit moves us
what whirring hundreds must
we concede to survive

and why

Foolish yes
sometimes clumsy coarse

sometimes insatiable

which extravagance is ours

what flowers do we harvest
when spring comes

THE STING

With great stealth and smoke
approach our dome. For if not,
a flame, dry and burning, a dazzling
destruction, only
momentary,
will greet you.

You, who threaten, let
this pin-prick, this red
fever-bite, be a warning.
In our saracen tunnels,
we hold our own, asking
nothing.

WORKER BEE PRAYER

Virgin daughter of toil
whose mysterious duties begin in light
now closely huddled
in darkness numbed it seems into
geometric silence
shimmering imperceptibly
unsuffocated by multitude
enlivened sacrificed entirely
to Republic to hive
to perpetual chastity
to manifold activity group mind
Instant pearl-diver
breaking out head first
through the living walls enclosing
into flowery expanse world
without blooming end
Return gasping for breath
into the syncopating mass
in which you freely breathe
Happy winged organ of your race
if ever isolated
dying from loneliness
tell us how among
our own adversities individualities
we might make something
whole
something
perfected by work
and sacrifice
something honey-gold

THE SWARM

First, the miraculous
droning, sibilant
dances directing and thumping,

buzzing in the foundation,
snipping and cutting
green air.

A great muffled drum,
the chorus tenses.
Its sibyls pour out

in a drunken jet
to sing it: the bee-flock,
the thunder-polleners

who tell exodus in a roaring tissue
their matriarch with them
throbbing Exalt!

Exalt! up to the pear tree.
Then, from the mass molten
with magnetism and cracks,

a yawn explodes, clumps
to the pear limb,
and silences.

Even now, scouts shuttle
through the branches making
fiery mummery to the sun:

inciting compass.
The fathoming nucleus
waits for the telling.

This is a thing,
some will say,
men will not do.

THE FOLK
Act 2: In the hive

nurses
tending nymphs and larvae
honored ladies
waiting on the Queen
house bees
airing refreshing heating the hive
fanning with wings

architects
masons wax-workers sculptors
constructing combs
foragers
sallying forth
chemists
preserving honey
formic acid dropped from sting-tips

capsuled males
sealing cells
sweepers
irreproachably cleaning
bearers
removing the dead

amazons
watching thresholds day and night
questioning comers and goers
welcoming novices home from first flights
scaring away vagabonds marauders loiterers
expelling interlopers
attacking foes

Hive’s minions
of the One Mind

individual indistinct

to the sweet mass you inhabit
invent

I bring you a human smoke to show you how
unconsciousness works

to show you

men and women claiming universal love
seeking the flowery field with compasses broken

around you and your spheres of endeavor
we lord over ruling nothing

your constellations remain
subtle abstracted

when the sun falls
star-bomb into our world
you like us will flare
into smoke
but unlike us
knowingly together

but then
what then of us

perhaps when the sun
falls terrible ball terromoto onto us
we will see as one
explode into whitefire whitedust
platinum honey

making the cosmos glow
into

eternal hexagonals of being

IMMOLATION / RESURRECTION
Act 3: Out there

Stars had abandoned you
You looked down and
a sea of eyes looked up
diminishing at warp speed

But this is earth
stars should be above but
above was
void
without name

If stars sang in the sky
their wisdom spheres where

the whirring

Now on rich earth
humic heaven
in an clump made static form

there stars sang and laughed at you
not sad ringing
with sphere’s secret latitudes and longitudes
with resurrection tin stars
hammered roughly
by lullaby verbs
by earnest limbs trembling
by staccato
sleek luminous particles
grown into ache:

eye coalescing into
galaxy

Self rang then
in the hive

under dull lamps just coming on:

evening percolating dense blackness
a smoothness made of crow voice
lizard blue

made of moon falling
painted white mum odor

A being so unlike itself
it was itself:

so curried and steamed it rose up

skin shining sweat
voice on fire
weed taking field
field becoming rain

All poems © 2010
by Jeffery Beam

http://constantstateofflux.com/2010/02/18/telling-the-bees/

I plan to write more soon.

btw, I love your sweet blog! Lots of info here to read.
thank you,

Louisa x