WHEN Fred Lenox arrived at his apiary in the Northern woods, he found the bees storing honey fast. It was the middle of June, and acres of wild raspberries were covered with bloom. The open slope, on which stood the eighty white-painted hives, roared with wings. Clouds of bees, laden with honey and mad for more, hurried into the hives. They came by thousands, too fast to count.

      With exultation Fred saw that the prospect was good for a thousand-dollar crop if he could only keep down swarming.

      With his brother, he had established this bee-yard in the Ontario woods three years before. It was ninety miles from home, and not far south of the Algonquin National Park. Every fortnight daring the summer the boys took turns visiting the yard. At the season for extracting the honey, they camped there together for a week or more. During the three years since they had established the apiary it had showed an average yearly profit of $600.

      It was a wild, rough country, twelve miles from the railroad and almost unsettled. Game overflowed from the strictly preserved National Park, and was plentiful. Beaver dammed the streams; the boys saw deer almost daily, and traces of moose were abundant. But an apiarist in the busy season has no time for sport, and Fred seldom had a chance to hunt.

      On this occasion his work was to check swarming. He unlocked the "extracting shanty," got out his tools, lighted his smoker, and set to work.

      The hive that he always examined first was one that contained Cyprian bees. These are particularly valued. Cyprians are of a beautiful golden-yellow, and are remarkably energetic workers, but they are so savage in temper that few beekeepers care to have them. They have such excellent qualities, however, that the boys had planned to breed a strain of their blood into the apiary, and had paid eight dollars for an imported Cyprian queen.

      Fred pried off the upper story of the Cyprians' hive, and found the box almost full of honey. He drove the surging bees down with a blast of smoke, and from the lower story took out two or three frames of comb covered with a yellow layer of excited bees.

      They swarmed up against his veil; they stung his bare hands; but in spite of their protest; he saw what he had feared he would find — a cluster of peanut-shaped queen-cells, each with a young embryo queen coiled at the bottom. The appearance of the cells showed that the colony was on the point of swarming.

      Fred proceeded to cut out the cells. Usually, cutting out the cells delays swarming, and sometimes prevents it altogether. At times, however, it seems to have no effect; and the swarm issues just as if the queen-cells had not been destroyed. It may happen that a cell is so hidden that the bee-keeper fails to see it; and the result of leaving a single cell is the same as if all the cells had been left.

      After cutting out the cells, Fred went on to the other hives. In almost all he found symptoms of the swarming fever, and he worked all the morning, destroying queen-cells and giving empty combs for storage room.

      After a late and hasty luncheon, he started to work again, when, with a loud roar, a volley of bees issued from one of the hives. For several minutes the cloud of insects swirled wildly in the air; then it concentrated round the nearest tree, and finally formed a brown cluster on one of the lower brunches.

      Almost before this swarm had settled, another, with a roar, emerged from a second hive, eddied about; and also began to cluster. And then a third colony swarmed.

      When bees are in the mood for it; the flying of a single swarm will sometimes set up a riot of swarming throughout an apiary, even in colonies that otherwise would not have swarmed so soon. This third swarm was followed by a fourth, then by a fifth; the last two joined, and clustered together in one enormous bunch. Another swarm came out. Bees darkened the air, and the sound was like that of a tornado.

      With empty hives Fred hived some of the swarms that he could reach easily, and dashed water on hives that looked threatening.

      He was surprised to see very few bees flying at the entrance of the Cyprians' hive. It flashed upon his mind that the colony had swarmed, and, moreover, that they had swarmed so long ago that the excitement had subsided. Eagerly he searched the trees, in the hope of finding the swarm still clustered, and of being able to hive it. When at last he did find it, the bees were not clustered quietly, but were in a state of excitement. Fred wondered whether the swarm had not yet fully settled, or whether it had been clustered a long time, and was now preparing to leave. He hastily started to hive it, but before he had time to do so, the cluster suddenly transformed itself into a swirling cloud of bees. For a few moments the swarm circled about; then off it started. Fred tore off his veil and rushed in pursuit; the eight-dollar queen was with that swarm.

      The runaways did not travel fast, and Fred could see the swarm gyrating and drifting like a cloud of smoke. But it moved too fast for him to keep pace with it over that rough ground. He held it in sight for nearly quarter of a mile, and then it faded like mist on the sky.

      Probably the bees had already selected some hollow tree for their new home. Fred determined to search the woods thoroughly the next day, and to find the swarm if it was within two miles.

      He went back to the apiary and spent the rest of the day in restoring order there. That night he slept in the extracting-house, and early the next morning he was out on the trail of his Cyprians.

      His outfit consisted of a pair of climbing-irons, a sack, a veil, a smoker, and a small field-glass. He also carried a compass, and with this instrument he carefully sighted the "bee-line" that the swarm had taken.

      Along this line he advanced slowly, examining with his glass the tops of all the trees, and especially the tops of those that looked as if they were hollow. But for all his vigilance, he saw no sign of the golden Cyprians.

      He was more than a mile from the apiary, stumbling along with his eyes on the treetops, when he was stopped by a sound like a savage, guttural grunt; apparently close by. It seemed to have come from a dense clump of willows and alders that fringed a small stream. As he gazed, he thought he saw In the thicket Ute form of a tall, dark animal — apparently a deer.

      His course lay through the willows, and he advanced, eager to get a look at the animal. He parted the branches, took a step or two, and had a clear glimpse of a bull moose standing in the shallow water, and glaring at him with lowered head. The next moment the animal charged.

      At the same moment Fred jumped back, found himself beside a low-branched cedar, and scrambled up it. He drew his legs out of reach just us the moose crashed into the tree with a force that jarred it to the roots.

      When Fred recovered his breath, he was amazed at this unprovoked attack. Bull moose, although sometimes dangerous in the autumn, are usually timid in the spring, and the new antlers of this one had not even outgrown the "velvet."

      The animal was hardly in fighting trim, but he was clearly in a murderous temper. He stamped, tore up the earth and bushes about the cedar, gritted his teeth, and cocked his eye up at the unlucky apiarist with a baleful glare. Then, all at once, Fred saw what was the matter.

      The lower part of the bull's right shoulder was mangled and torn with wounds that were evidently not more than a day or two old. They might have been made by the claws of a hear or panther, or by a load of buckshot. Obviously, they were enough to account for a good deal of bad temper.

      The bull's hostility did not last long. Fred had turned to look up at the branches above; when he again looked down, the space beneath him was empty. The moose had slipped silently away into the woods.

      Whether he had gone far, or was merely hiding in a near-by thicket; Fred could not tell. He hesitated to come down, and for some moments he sat in the treetop, looking about dubiously. Then something caught his eye, and gave him a joyful surprise.

      About twenty yards away there was a great brownish lump clustered at the tip of a low maple sapling, which bent slightly under its weight. Fred took out his glass. The lump was a swarm of bees, and the insects showed a bright golden yellow where the sunlight struck them.

      They looked like his Cyprians, but he could hardly believe that they were the absconding swarm. It is rare for such a swarm to remain clustered in the open overnight at such a distance from its home. However, bees do not always follow fixed rules, and Fred had seen too much unexpected behavior on their part to be greatly surprised.

      The bees, however, were not likely to stay clustered much longer, and he was eager to secure them. After waiting several minutes, during which he neither saw nor heard anything of his enemy, he slid to the ground and hastened to the maple sapling.

      The bees were indeed his golden Cyprians; they made a faint musical murmur as they clung together.

      The tree on which they had clustered was several yards on one side of the bee-line, and Fred would probably not have seen them if it had not been for his elevated position. He had the moose to thank for that.

      They were out of reach, but it was easy to bend the sapling. Fred held the mouth of the sack under the swarm, then shook the tree sharply. There was a sudden roar as a heavy weight dropped into the sack. He had secured the whole swarm — all except a few hundred bees, some of which dashed against his face and tried to sting him.

      With great elation, Fred gathered up the rest of his outfit and turned back toward the apiary. The sack over his shoulder hummed and stirred with the efforts of the angry insects to get out.

      He had gone hardly ten yards when something moved in the underbrush. He stopped, startled. The next instant a fearful bellow filled the woods, and the wounded bull burst through a curtain of low evergreens.

      Fred turned, and still clinging to the sack, ran as fast as he could. Fortunately, the bull was lame from its wound — a circumstance that somewhat affected its speed. As it was, Fred was almost run down; he saved himself only by leaping to one side and changing his direction. All the time he kept on the lookout for a tree that he could climb, and he held fast to the sack; he was determined not to drop it except as a last resort; for the mouth was not tied, and if he should let go of it, the bees would at once escape.

      The hoofs of the bull clattered behind him. Fred dodged wildly again, swerved behind a tree, and caught sight of a dead hemlock trunk that was spiked with short branches, and leaned at a decided angle.

      It was almost as easy to climb as a ladder, and Fred scrambled up it with his swarm to safety.

      The bull's fury was uncontrollable. He roared terrifically; his black mane stood stiffly on end, and he gritted and gnashed his teeth. He reared up with his forefeet against the trunk; then he withdrew a few yards, and charged into it with such force that, to Fred's horror, it gave slightly, and leaned even farther over than before. Evidently the roots were rotten, and held insecurely. It was no place of safety, after all.

      Again the bull crashed into the trunk, and this time, with an ominous creaking, it sagged still more.

      The result seemed to encourage the bull, and he rammed his head against the trunk and pushed hard. Fred heard the rotten roots snapping. Pausing now and again to glance up with what appeared to be a gleam of savage triumph in his eye, the bull continued to butt and push.

      While Fred's support swayed momentarily farther and farther, he clung to it panic-stricken; in a few seconds he would be hurled under the brute's hoofs. Then it flashed upon him that he had one weapon left, and a terrible one. He disliked to use it, even to save his life, but another charge of the bull, and a heavy lurch of the almost uprooted tree, convinced him that he must not hesitate.

      He held the sack directly over the bull's head, and shook out the swarm. At the same time he drew his coat over his head and face. There was a hissing roar, like that from a burst steam-pipe, and he felt a dozen burning stings on his hands. At the same moment, he heard a sudden, astonished snort from the bull, and then a sound of furious trampling.

      Fred ventured to peep through an opening in his coat. The air round him was full of bees, and the bull's whole face and head appeared covered by an undulating yellow mask. Hundreds of bees were clinging to it and stinging pitilessly, while the animal rushed about, fiercely shaking its head, and bellowing with pain and fury.

      The moose started to run blindly, and collided with a tree. Then he made a fresh start, and this time splashed into the brook, where it was evident from the sounds that he was rolling in the water. Probably he thus freed himself from some of his tormentors, but certainly not from all. He dashed out of the water, bolted past Fred's tree with knots of bees still clinging to his wet hair, and crashed through underbrush into the woods. Fred could still hear him when he was fully half a mile away.

      Fred, who was badly stung himself, lost no time in slipping down, and climbing into a safer tree at a distance from the cloud of bees that still hovered about. He remained there for half an hour or more before he finally ventured to start home.

      He picked up the sack where he had dropped it, and was surprised and overjoyed to find on the tip of a cedar twig close by a little cluster of bees among which he detected the long, golden body of his imported queen. There was scarcely a handful of bees left in the swarm, but since he had the queen, he was content.

      He carried the swarm home in his handkerchief. The golden queen he put back in her own hive again, and eventually he succeeded in breeding several excellent queens from her eggs. The savage temper of the golden bees never again seemed objectionable to him.