Word: bee
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
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...
...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...
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...