Swarm Tree: Of Honeybees, Honeymoons and the Tree of Life

By Doug Elliott

Following tracks, messing with bees, chasing butterflies, stalking deer, tickling trout and picking up pawpaws—and hitchhikers. This lively collection by celebrated storyteller Doug Elliott will delight readers with its blend of natural history and heartfelt, hilarious takes on life. Whether tracking skunks, philosophizing over dung beetles or reading divine script on the back of a trout, Elliott brings a sense of wonder and humor to every story. His broad scientific and cultural knowledge of the Appalachians and beyond is a treasure. Dive deeply into the richness of the natural world, climb high into the tree of life and return—with amazing tales, humorous insights and deep spiritual truths.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781614236023

Doug Elliott

Doug Elliott is the author of Woodslore and Wildwoods Wisdom and lives in Union Mills, North Carolina.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Swarm Tree

The Day the Bees Fell on My Head

I was fifty feet up a tree. It was in the spring of my fiftieth year when fifty thousand bees fell on my head. Fifty thousand bees weigh more than you might think—maybe four or five pounds. The mass landed heavily, with a buzzing thud, and pushed my hat down to my ears. Within a few seconds I was virtually covered with bees. They oozed down over my shoulders, arms and trunk like a mass of living, breathing, buzzing pudding. The bees that missed me began flying back, frantically hovering and trying to rejoin their hive mates that were crawling all over me.

I was so glad that I had worn my bee veil. I had my long-sleeved beekeeper’s gloves, too, but the gloves dangled uselessly from my back pocket. I wanted to have a good grip on the branches while climbing the tree so I hadn’t worn them. My long-sleeved shirt offered some protection, but those bees tickled as they crawled all over my unprotected wrists, exploring my open sleeves and the white knuckles of my bare hands as I grasped those treetop branches for dear life.

For some reason I got to thinking about a honeybee’s stinger. It is such an amazing organ. A bee’s stinger is much more than a simple hypodermic needle. It has three moving parts that work together. The top of the stinger is a needle-sharp stylus. Underneath the stylus are two barbed lancets. Together these three parts form the three-sided venom canal. At the base of the stinger is the muscular venom gland.

When a bee stings you, she jabs that needle-sharp stylus in you, and those two barbed lancets start working back and forth. The barbs catch in your flesh, and they pull the stinger deeper and deeper. Meanwhile the venom gland pumps the venom down the canal, and that’s when you start to feel "a pain so characteristic that one knows not wherewith to compare it; a kind of destroying dryness, a flame of the desert rushing over the wounded limb as though these daughters of the sun had distilled a dazzling poison from their father’s angry