Bee Lining: The Oldtimers' Way to Find Wild Beehives

Honeybees have been domesticated for millennia, but they don’t always rely on the housing beekeepers provide them in exchange for harvesting their honey. Honeybees remain wild enough to survive on their own, and they can do so miles from the orchards and other food sources with which we associate them. Often, they’ll build their hive in a hollow tree deep in the forest. Harvesting a “wild” bee tree was the way many local people used to get honey and new colonies of bees. In order to obtain the honey and the bees, the tree often had to be cut down and the honeycomb removed, in the process destroying the hive, so it’s not something that should be done today. Honeybees have enough problems, what with mites and mysterious colony disappearances. But locating these “bee trees” can still be a challenging and rewarding way to combine woodsmanship, map and compass, GPS, and computer skills into one exercise. Purposely finding a bee tree is possible…