> In search of authoritative information on Feral colonies and tree types, I lucked upon this:
> Edgell, G. Harold. (1949). The Bee Hunter. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

That is a VERY good book on bee-lining, one of a handful of books that can get one started in the hobby.
It's very short, about 50 pages, but it makes up for being short by being well-thought-out.
I was lucky enough to have it suggested by Kim Flottum, Bob Cole, Ann Harmon, Larry Connor, or one of the other pillars of EAS, I forget which, but I bought a copy, and it made my Virginia bee-lining afternoons with my dog much more productive.
It can be read or downloaded here:

https://archive.org/details/TheBeeHunter

This book, and Tom Seeley's more recent book are perhaps the only two ever written that are actual useful instruction manuals.

Edgell was like many honored beekeepers - he was a success at something else first, beekeeping was an avocation, not a vocation.  He was an art historian, director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Dean of Harvard's architecture department, boatloads of honors. He also kept bees, and lined them.

But I must take exception to the wild speculative claim that "authoritative information on Feral colonies" exists. 
It does not.
There is no such information, by definition.
They're bees.  Get used to it. 

The challenge of trying to find bee trees in the age of varroa is that they just aren't as common as they were.
Pre-varroa, the feral hives were very common, so "sure-fire techniques" for finding them were a dime a dozen, and the same country-bumpkin charlatans that would dowse for water would also "line bees".  This created all sorts of misinformation and myth.  The bee-lining box was merely the pendulum or the forked stick in the exercise of rhabdomancy.  The process was (literally!) a Karl Pearson style "Random Walk".

Edgell used the same (somewhat ponderous) method that Tom Seeley espouses in his more recent book. This approach may be the best you can do in forested areas with no clearings.  But you will find the hives much more quickly if you have clearings from which to release a bee or two (which demands a 3-chamber bee-lining box) and watch them circle to get their bearings and then fly off on a heading home, and thereby triangulate the hive location using map and compass or a GPS with a "project a bearing" or "project a waypoint" function. (There are several "Geocaching" apps that can do this on your phone, so the only advantage of a "real" GPS (Garmin, et al) is that you can drop it on a rock on in a puddle and still expect it to work afterwards.)

While I will not mention my go-to tree species again, for fear of prompting another round of tedious refutation attempts, I will say that oversOAKed clOAKrooms are rarely resOAKed. 

Ley lines were also mentioned... sheesh... this started in the 1920s with the book "The Old Straight Track", by Watkins, who was the "Erich Von Daniken" of his day.   Nearly all of these "mappings" result in anything but straight lines between historical structure sites when one maps accurately, but the basic underlying problem is that "discovering" random points to be in an absolutely straight line is inevitable as the area and number of points increase.  There's solid math to prove it.

There are a few papers that explain this artifact of any large-scale physical dataset, and regular as clockwork, they have to be dusted off and presented to someone who thinks that they have found a pattern in their dataset.
One early one was https://www.jstor.org/stable/1426603 . The specific application to quasars was debunked here:
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PWT3eYwheVFz8lvfz02vBATs3bqX_C4t/view?usp=sharing
https://preview.tinyurl.com/y543v9s8

With the quasars the "width of the line" was limited by the low resolution of the image (2 arc seconds, 1/3600th of a degree) an angle covering quite a wide area over the unfathomable distances out to the quasars.  Watkins had less of an excuse, as a 1mm wide pencil lead on a 1:50,000 map makes a line that is a only 50 meters (~150 feet) wide, and the British survey maps of his time were amazingly good, even by today's "laser and GPS" standards of precision.

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