Word: beeing
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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...
...wife, Sentoria, heard about it and came rushing down to take him home. But she couldn't keep him there-Jim strolled back to the poolroom for a while, then sauntered over to the Busy Bee for a cup of coffee. That was when the cops came. They hauled Jim to Waukegan jail and started talking. "All right, you black son-ofabitch, tell the truth," demanded one. "We know you done...