 Section 16b of the Mountains of California. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer. Visit LibriVox.org. The Mountains of California by John Muir. Section 16b from the Bee Pastures. The average elevation of the north half of the Sierra is, as we have seen considerably less than that of the south half. And small streams, with the bank and metal gardens dependent upon them, are less abundant. Around the headwaters of the Yuba, Feather, and Pit rivers, the extensive tablelands of lava are sparsely planted with pines, through which the sunshine reaches the ground with little interruption. Here flourishes a scattered, tufted growth of golden aplopavus, linoceros, bahia, guayathia, arnica, artemisia, and similar plants, with monsonita, cherry, plum, and thorn in ragged patches on the cooler hill slopes. At the extremities of the Great Central Plain, the Sierra and coast ranges curve around and lock together in a labyrinth of mountains and valleys, throughout which their flores are mingled, making, at the north, with its temperate climate and copious rainfall, a perfect paradise for bees. Though, strange to say, scarcely a single, regular bee ranch has yet been established in it. Of all the upper flower fields of the Sierra, Shasta is the most honey-full, and yet may surpass in fame the celebrated honey-hills of Heibla and Harthi Hymetis. Regarding this noble mountain, from a bee-point of view, encircled by its many climates and sweeping aloft from the torrid plain into the frosty azure, we find the first five thousand feet from the summit, generally snow-clad, and therefore about as honey-less as the sea. The base of this arctic region is girdled by a belt of crumbling lava, measuring about a thousand feet in vertical breadth, and is mostly free from snow and summer. Beautiful lichens enliven the faces of the cliffs with their bright colors, and, in some of the warmer nooks, there are a few tufts of alpine daisies—wallflowers and penstemons—but, notwithstanding, these bloom freely in late summer. The zone as a whole is almost as honey-less as the icy summit, and its lower edge may be taken as the honey-line. Immediately below this comes the forest zone, covered with a rich growth of conifers, chiefly silver firs, rich in pollen and honey-dew, and diversified with countless garden openings, many of them less than a hundred yards across. Next, in orderly succession, comes the Great Bee Zone. Its area far surpasses that of the icy summit and both the other zones combined, for it goes sweeping majestically around the entire mountain with a breadth of six or seven miles and a circumference of nearly a hundred miles. Shasta, as we have already seen, is a fire mountain created by a succession of eruptions of ashes and molten lava, which, flowing over the lips of its several craters, grew outward and upward like the trunk of a naughty, exogenous tree. Then followed a strange contrast. The glacial winter came on, loading the cooling mountain with ice, which flowed slowly outward in every direction, radiating from the summit in the form of one vast conical glacier, a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smoldering fire. Crushing and grinding for centuries its brown, flinty lavas with incessant activity and thus degrading and remodeling the entire mountain. When at length the glacial period began to draw near its close, the ice mantle was gradually melted off around the bottom and, in receding and breaking into its present fragmentary condition, irregular rings and heaps of moraine matter were stored upon its flanks. The glacial erosion of most of the Shasta lavas produced detritus composed of rough subangular boulders of moderate size and of porous gravel and sand, which yields freely to the transporting power of running water. Magnificent floods from the ample fountains of ice and snow, working with sublime energy upon this prepared glacial detritus, sorted it out and carried down immense quantities from the higher slopes, and reformed it in smooth, delta-like beds around the base. And it is these flood-beds joined together that now form the main honey-zone of the old volcano. Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, as Mother Nature accomplished her beneficent designs, now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water, and at length an outburst of organic life, a milky way of snowy petals and wings, girdling the rugged mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating against its sides had broken into a foam of plant, bloom, and bees, as sea waves break in bloom on a rock shore. In this flowery wilderness the bees rove and revel, rejoicing in the bounty of the sun, clambering eagerly through bramble and huckle-bloom, ringing the myriad bells of the Monsonita, now humming aloft among polliny willows and furs, now down on the ashy ground among gillias and butter-cups, and anon plunging deep into snowy banks of cherry and buckthorn. They consider the lilies and roll into them, and like lilies they toil not, for they are impelled by sun-power, as water-wheels by water-power, and when the one has plenty of high-pressure water, the other plenty of sun-shine they hum and quiver alike. Sauntering in the Shasta bee-lands in the Sundays of summer, one may readily infer the time of day from the comparative energy of bee movements alone, drowsy and moderate in the cool of the morning, increasing in energy with the ascending sun, and, at high noon, thrilling and quivering in wild ecstasy, then gradually declining again to the stillness of night. In my excursions among the glaciers I occasionally meet bees that are hungry, like mountaineers who venture too far and remain too long above the bread-line, then they droop and wither like autumn leaves. The Shasta bees are perhaps better fed than any others in the Sierra. Their field work is one perpetual feast, but, however exhilarating, the sunshine or bountiful the supply of flowers, they are always dainty feeders. Humming-moths and humming-bird seldom set foot upon a flower, but poise on the wing in front of it, and reach forward as if they were sucking through straws. But bees, though as dainty as they, hug their favourite flowers with profound cordiality and push their blunt, polliny faces against them, like babies on their mother's bosom. And fondly, too, with eternal love, does Mother Nature clasp her small bee-babies and suckle them, multitudes at once, on her warm Shasta breast. Besides the common honey-bee there are many other species here, fine, mossy, burly fellows who were nourished on the mountains thousands of sunny seasons before the advent of the domestic species. Among these are the bumble-bees, mason-bees, carpenter-bees, and leaf-cutters. Butterflies, too, and moths of every size and pattern, some broad-winged like bats flapping slowly and sailing in easy curves, others like small, flying violets, shaking about loosely and short crooked flights close to the flowers, feasting luxuriously night and day. Great numbers of deer also delight to dwell in the brushy portions of the bee-pastures. Bears, too, roam the sweet wilderness, their blunt, shaggy forms harmonising well with the trees and tangled bushes, and with the bees also notwithstanding the disparity in size. They are fond of all good things and enjoy them to the utmost, with but little troublesome discrimination, flowers and leaves as well as berries, and the bees themselves as well as their honey. Though the California bears have as yet but little experience with honey-bees, they often succeed in reaching their bountiful stores, and it seems doubtful whether bees themselves enjoy honey with so great a relish. By means of their powerful teeth and claws, they can gnaw and tear open almost any hive conveniently accessible. Most honey-bees, however, in search of a home, are wise enough to make choice of a hollow in a living-tree, a considerable distance above the ground where such places are to be had. Then they are pretty secure, for though the smaller black and brown bears climb well, they are unable to break into strong hives, while compelled to exert themselves to keep from falling, and at the same time to endure the stings of the fighting bees without having their paws free to rub them off. But woe to the black bumblebees discovered in their mossy nests in the ground. With a few strokes of their huge paws, the bears uncover the entire establishment, and before time is given for a general buzz, bees old and young, larvae, honey, stings, nest, and all, are taken in one ravishing mouthful. Not the least influential of the agents concerned in the superior sweetness of the Shasta flora are its storms. Storms I mean that are strictly local, bred and borne on the mountain. The magical rapidity with which they are grown on the mountaintop, and bestow their charity in rain and snow, never fails to astonish the inexperienced lowlander. Often in calm, glowing days, while the bees are still on the wing, a storm cloud may be seen far above in the pure ether, swelling its pearl bosses and growing silently like a plant. Presently a clear, ringing discharge of thunder is heard, followed by a rush of wind that comes sounding over the bending woods like the roar of the ocean, mingling raindrops, snowflowers, honeyflowers, and bees in wild storm harmony. Still more impressive are the warm, reviving days of spring in the mountain pastures. The blood of the plants throbbing beneath the life-giving sunshine seems to be heard and felt. Plant growth goes on before our eyes, and every tree in the woods, and every bush and flower, is seen as a hive of restless industry. The deeps of the sky are mottled with singing wings of every tone and color, clouds of brilliant chrysotidae dancing and swirling in exquisite rhythm, golden-barred Vespidae, dragonflies, butterflies, grating cicadas, and jolly, rattling grasshoppers, fairly enameling delight. On bright crisp mornings a striking optical effect may frequently be observed from the shadows of the higher mountains while the sunbeams are pouring past overhead. Then every insect, no matter what may be its own proper color, burns white in the light. Gauzy winged hymenoptera, moths, jet-black beetles, all are transfigured alike in pure spiritual white like snowflakes. In Southern California, where bee culture has had so much skillful attention of late years, the pasturage is not more abundant or more advantageously varied as to the number of its honey-plants and their distribution over mountain and plain, than that of many other portions of the state where the industrial currents flow in other channels. The famous white sage, Audubergia, belonging to the mint family, flourishes here in all its glory, blooming in May and yielding great quantities of clear pale honey, which is greatly prized and every market it has yet reached. This species grows chiefly in the valleys and low hills. The black sage on the mountains is part of a dense thorny chaparral, which is composed chiefly of adenastoma, seanithus, manzanita, and cherry, not differing greatly from that of the southern portion of the Sierra, but more dense and continuous and taller and remaining longer in bloom. Stream-side gardens, so charming a feature of both the Sierra and Coast mountains, are less numerous in Southern California, but they are exceedingly rich in honey-flowers, wherever found. Melilitus, Columbine, Colencia, Verbena, Zauschneria, wild rose, honeysuckle, Philadelphia, and lilies rising from the warm, moist dells in a very storm of exuberance. Wild buckwheat of many species is developed in abundance over the dry, sandy valleys and lower slopes of the mountains toward the end of summer, and is, at this time, the main dependence of the bees, reinforced here and thereby orange groves, alfalfa fields, and small home gardens. The main honey months in ordinary seasons are April, May, June, July, and August, while the other months are usually flowery enough to yield sufficient for the bees. According to Mr. J. T. Gordon, president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, the first bees introduced into the county were a single hive, which cost $150 in San Francisco, and arrived in September, 1854. Footnote. Fifteen hives of Italian bees were introduced into Los Angeles County in 1855, and in 1876 they had increased to 500. The marked superiority claimed for them over the common species is now attracting considerable attention. End of footnote. In April of the following year this hive sent out two swarms, which were sold for $100 each. From this small beginning the bees gradually multiplied to about 3,000 swarms in the year 1873. In 1876 it was estimated that there were between 15,000 to 20,000 hives in the county, producing an annual yield of about 100 pounds to the hive. In some exceptional cases a much greater yield. In San Diego County at the beginning of the season of 1878 there were about 24,000 hives, and the shipments from the one port of San Diego for the same year from July 17th to November 10th were 1,071 barrels, 15,544 cases, and nearly 90 tons. The largest bee ranches have about 1,000 hives and are carefully and skillfully managed every scientific appliance of merit being brought into use. There are few beekeepers, however, who own half as many as this or who give their undivided attention to the business. Orange culture at present is heavily overshadowing every other business. A good many of the so-called bee ranches of Los Angeles and San Diego counties are still of the rudest pioneer kind imaginable. A man unsuccessful in everything else hears the interesting story of the profits and comforts of beekeeping and concludes to try it. He buys a few colonies, or gets them, from some overstocked ranch on shares, takes them back to the foot of some canyon where the pastureage is fresh, squats on the land with or without the permission of the owner, sets up his hives, makes a box cabin for himself scarcely bigger than a bee hive, and awaits his fortune. Bees suffer sadly from famine during the dry years, which occasionally occur in the southern and middle portions of the state, if the rainfall amounts to only 3 or 4 inches instead of from 12 to 20 as in ordinary seasons. Then sheep and cattle die in the thousands, and so do these small winged cattle, unless they are carefully fed or removed to other pastures. The year 1877 will long be remembered as exceptionally rainless and distressing. Scarcely a flower bloomed on the dry valleys away from the stream-sides and not a single grainfield depending upon rain was reaped. The seed, only sprouted, came up a little way and withered. Horses, cattle, and sheep grew thinner day by day, nibbling at bushes and weeds along the shallowing edges of streams, many of which were dried up altogether, for the first time since the settlement of the country. In the course of a trip I made during the summer of that year through Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties, the deplorable effects of the drought were everywhere visible. Leafless fields, dead and dying cattle, dead bees, and half-dead people with dusty, doleful faces. Even the birds and squirrels were in distress, though their suffering was less painfully apparent than that of the poor cattle. These were falling one by one in slow, sure starvation along the banks of the hot sluggish streams, while thousands of buzzards correspondingly fat were sailing above them or standing gorged on the ground beneath the trees, waiting with easy faith for fresh carcasses. The quails, prudently considering the hard times, abandoned all thought of paring. They were too poor to marry, and so continued in flocks all through the year without attempting to rear young. The ground squirrels, although an exceptionally industrious and enterprising race, as every farmer knows, were hard pushed for a living. Not a fresh leaf or seed was to be found, but a wave in the trees, whose bossy masses of dark green foliage presented a striking contrast to the ashen baldness of the ground beneath them. The squirrels, leaving their accustomed feening grounds, betook themselves to the leafy oaks to gnaw out the acorn-stores of the provident woodpeckers, but the latter kept up a vigilant watch upon their movements. I noticed four woodpeckers in league against one squirrel, driving the poor fellow out of an oak that they claimed. He dodged round the knotty trunk from side to side as nimbly as he could in his famished condition, only to find a sharp bill everywhere. But the fate of the bees that year seemed the saddest of all. In different portions of Los Angeles and San Diego counties from one-half to three-fourths of them died of sheer starvation. Not less than 18,000 colonies perished in these two counties alone, while in the adjacent counties the death rate was hardly less. Even the colonies nearest to the mountains suffered this year, for the smaller vegetation on the foothills was affected by the drought almost as severely as that of the valleys and plains, and even the hardy, deep-rooted chaparral, the surest dependence of the bees, bloomed sparingly while much of it was beyond reach. Every swarm could have been saved, however, by promptly supplying them with food when their own stores began to fail, and before they became enfeebled and discouraged, or by cutting roads back into the mountains and taking them into the heart of the flowery chaparral. The Santa Lucia, San Rafael, San Gabriel, San Acinto, and San Bernardino ranges are almost untouched as yet by the wild bees. Some idea of their resources and of the advantages and disadvantages they offer to beekeepers may be formed from an excursion that I made into the San Gabriel range about the beginning of August of the dry year. This range, containing most of the characteristic features of the other ranges just mentioned, overlooks the Los Angeles vineyards and orange groves from the north, and is more rigidly inaccessible, in the ordinary meaning of the word, than any other that I ever attempted to penetrate. The slopes are exceptionally steep and insecure to the foot, and they are covered with thorny bushes from five to ten feet high, with the exception of little spots not visible in general views, the entire surface is covered with them, masked in close hedge growth, sweeping gracefully down into every gorge and hollow, and swelling over every ridge and summit in jaggy, ungovernable exuberance, offering more honey to the acre for half the year than the most crowded clover field. But when beheld from the open San Gabriel valley, beaten with dry sunshine, all that was seen of the range seemed to wear a forbidding aspect. From base to summit all seemed gray, barren, silent, its glorious chaparral appearing like dry moss, creeping over its dull wrinkled ridges and hollows. Setting out from Pasadena, I reached the foot of the range about sundown, and being weary and heated with my walk across the shadeless valley, concluded to camp for the night. After resting a few moments, I began to look about among the flood-bolders of Eaton Creek for a camp-crown, when I came upon a strange, dark-looking man who had been chopping cordwood. He seemed surprised at seeing me, and I sat down with him on the live oak log he had been cutting and made haste to give a reason for my appearance in his solitude, explaining that I was anxious to find out something about the mountains and meant to make my way up Eaton Creek next morning. Then he kindly invited me to camp with him and led me to his little cabin, situated at the foot of the mountains, where a small spring loses out of a bank overgrown with wild rose bushes. After supper, when the daylight was gone, he explained that he was out of candles, so we sat in the dark while he gave me a sketch of his life in a mixture of Spanish and English. He was born in Mexico, his father Irish, his mother Spanish. He had been a miner, rancher, prospector, hunter, et cetera, rambling always, and wearing his life away in mere waste. But now he was going to settle down. His past life, he said, was of no account, but the future was promising. He was going to make money and marry a Spanish woman. People mine here for water as for gold. He had been running a tunnel into a spur of the mountain back of his cabin. My prospect is good, he said, and if I chance to strike a good strong flow, I'll soon be worth five thousand or ten thousand dollars. For that flat out there, referring to a small irregular patch of bouldery detritus, two or three acres in size, that had been deposited by Eaton Creek during some flood season, that flat is large enough for a nice orange grove, and the bank behind the cabin will do for a vineyard. And after watering my own trees and vines, I will have some water left to sell to my neighbors below me, down the valley. And then, he continued, I can keep bees and make money that way too, for the mountains above here are just full of honey in the summertime, and one of my neighbors down here says that he will let me have a whole lot of hives on shares to start with. You see, I have a good thing, I'm all right now. All this prospective affluence in the sunken, boulder choked floodbed of a mountain stream. Leaving the bees out of the count, most fortune-seekers would as soon think of settling on the summit of Mount Shasta. Next morning, wishing my hopeful entertainer good luck, I set out on my shaggy excursion. About half a mile's walk above the cabin, I came to the fall, famous throughout the valley settlements, as the finest yet discovered in San Gabriel Mountains. It is a charming little thing with a low, sweet voice, singing like a bird, as it pours from a notch in a short ledge, some thirty-five or forty feet into a round mirror pool. The face of the cliff back of it, and on both sides, is smoothly covered and embossed with mosses, against which the white water shines out in showy relief, like a silver instrument in a velvet case. Here come the San Gabriel lads and lassies to gather ferns and dabble away their hot holidays in the cool water, glad to escape from their commonplace palm gardens and orange groves. The delicate maiden-hair grows on fissured rocks within reach of the spray, while broad-leaved maples and sycamores cast soft, mellow shade over a rich profusion of bee-flowers, growing among boulders in front of the pool. The fall, the flowers, the bees, the ferny rocks and leafy shade, forming a charming little poem of wildness, the last of a series extending down the flowery slopes of Mount San Antonio through the rugged, foam-beaten bosses of the main Eaton Canyon. From the base of the fall I followed the ridge that forms the western rim of the Eaton Basin to the summit of one of the principal peaks, which is about five thousand feet above sea level. Then, turning eastward, I crossed the middle of the basin, forcing away over its main subordinate ridges and across its eastern rim, having to contend almost everywhere with the floweriest and most impenetrable growth of honey-bushes I ever encountered since first my mountaineering began. Most of the Shasta Chaparral is leafy, nearly to the ground. Here the main stems are naked, for three or four feet, and interspiked with dead twigs, forming a stiff chervaux de frise, through which even the bears make their way with difficulty. I was compelled to creep for miles on all fours, and in following the bear trails often found tufts of hair on the bushes, where they had forced themselves through. For one hundred feet or so above the fall, the ascent was made possible only by tough cushions of club moss that clung to the rock. Above this the ridge weathers away to a thin knife-blade for a few hundred yards, and thence to the summit of the range it carries a bristly mane of Chaparral. Here and there small openings occur on rocky places, commanding fine views across the cultivated valley to the ocean. These, I found by the tracks, were favorite outlooks and resting places for the wild animals, bears, wolves, foxes, wildcats, etc., which abound here, and would have to be taken into account in the establishment of bee ranches. In the deepest thickets I found wood-rat villages, groups of huts four to six feet high, built of sticks and leaves and rough tapering piles, like musk-rat cabins. I noticed a good many bees, too, most of them wild. The tame honeybees seemed languid and wing-weary, as if they had come all the way up from the flowerless valley. After reaching the summit I had time to make only a hasty survey of the basin, now glowing in the sunset gold, before hastening down into one of the tributary canyons in search of water. Emerging from a particularly tedious breadth of Chaparral I found myself free and erect in a beautiful park-like grove of mountain-live oak, where the ground was planted with espidiums and brier roses, while the glossy foliage made a close canopy overhead, leaving the gray dividing trunks bare to show the beauty of their interlacing arches. The bottom of the canyon was dry, where I first reached it, but a bunch of scarlet mimulus indicated water at no great distance, and I soon discovered about a bucketful in a hollow of the rock. This, however, was full of dead bees, wasps, beetles, and leaves well steeped and simmered, and would therefore require boiling and filtering through fresh charcoal before it could be made available. Tracing the dry channel about a mile farther down to its junction with a larger tributary canyon I at length discovered a lot of boulder pools, clear as crystal, brimming full, and linked together by glistening streamlets just strong enough to sing audibly. Flowers in full bloom adorned their margins, lilies ten feet high, larks spur, column binds, and luxuriant ferns, leaning and overarching in lavish abundance while a noble old live oak spread its rugged arms over all. Here I camped, making my bed on smooth cobblestones. Next day, in the channel of a tributary that heads on Mount San Antonio, I passed about fifteen or twenty gardens like the one in which I slept, lilies and every one of them, in the full pomp of bloom. My third camp was made near the middle of the general basin at the head of a long system of cascades from ten to twenty feet high, one following the other in close succession down a rocky inaccessible canyon, making a total descent of nearly one thousand seven hundred feet. Above the cascades the mainstream passes through a series of open, sunny levels, the largest of which are about an acre in size, where the wild bees and their companions were feasting on a showy growth of Zauschneria, painted cups, and Manardella, and gray squirrels were busy harvesting the burrs of the Douglas spruce, the only conifer I met in the basin. The eastern slopes of the basin are in every way similar to those we have described, and the same may be said of the other portions of the range. From the highest summit, far as the eye could reach, the landscape was one vast bee pasture, a rolling wilderness of honey bloom, scarcely broken by bits of forest, or the rocky outcrops of hilltops and ridges. Behind the San Bernardino Range lies the wild sagebrush country, bounded on the east by the Colorado River, an extending and a general, northerly direction to Nevada, and along the eastern base of the Sierra, beyond Mano Lake. The greater portion of this immense region, including Owens Valley, Death Valley, and the sink of the Mojave, the area of which is nearly one fifth that of the entire state, is usually regarded as a desert, not because of any lack in the soil, but for want of rain and rivers available for irrigation. Very little of it, however, is desert in the eyes of a bee. Looking now over all the available pastures of California, it appears that the business of beekeeping is still in its infancy. Even in the more enterprising of the southern counties, where so vigorous a beginning has been made, less than a tenth of their honey resources have as yet been developed. While in the great plain, the coast ranges, the Sierra Nevada, and the northern region about Mount Shasta, the business can hardly be said to exist at all. What the limits of its developments in the future may be, with the advantages of cheaper transportation and the invention of better methods in general, it is not easy to guess. Nor, on the other hand, are we able to measure the influence on bee interests, likely to follow the destruction of the forests, now rapidly falling before fire and the axe. As to the sheep evil, that can hardly become greater than it is at the present day. In short, notwithstanding the widespread deterioration and destruction of every kind already affected, California, with her incomparable climate and flora, is still, as far as I know, the best of all the bee-lands of the world. End of Section 16b, The Bee Pastures, and End of the Mountains of California by John Muir. Read by Dennis Sayers in Modesto, California, for LibriVox, Spring 2007.