Note 54 — Chapter IV

For instance, the natives on the river Bogan used the new tomahawks, given them by Major Mitchell, in getting wild honey—a food very commonly eaten in Australia—from the hollow branches of the trees. It seemed as though, in the proper season, they could find it almost everywhere. “To such inexpert clowns as they probably thought us,” continues the Major, “the honey and the bees were inaccessible, and indeed, invisible, save only when the natives cut the former out, and brought it to us in little sheets of bark; thus displaying a degree of ingenuity and skill in supplying wants, which we, with all our science, could not hope to attain.” They caught a bee, and stuck to it, with gum or resin, some light down of a swan or owl: thus laden, the bee would make for its nest in some lofty tree, and betray its store of sweets.—Mitchell’s Three Expeditions, vol. i. p. 173.