The sullen listlessness that had hung over the apiary for over a week was gone. Bees were at work from every hive, coming and going with a swift activity like the days of the willow bloom.
“Hurrah! We must put on the supers at once,” cried Alice. “I believe we ought to have had them on several days ago.”
Breakfast was hurried through that morning, and no dishes were washed up after it. They hurried down to the barn to bring up the prepared supers, placing one beside each hive, so that they could all be put on at once.
The supers for extracted honey were exactly the same size as the body of the hive itself, without either top or bottom, and each containing eight ready-built frames of comb. The cover of the hive is removed and the super set upon it, then the cover replaced on the top of the two-story edifice. Usually a sheet of zinc queen-excluder is placed between the two, the perforations so accurately made that they will let the workers pass into the upper story, while the larger-bodied queen cannot get through. The lower story is then known as the brood-chamber, and the ideal condition is for the queen to keep this division constantly full of the cycle of eggs, larvæ, and hatching bees, while the workers store all the honey in the super, convenient for taking off.
A good deal of comb honey in one-pound sections was to be produced also, and Alice had already picked out the strongest colonies for this work. Section honey is a fancy product and sells at a high price, and the apiarists counted on this to pay off the $500 due in August. For that reason, the comb-honey crop was of the most immediate importance, though there would be a greater quantity of the extracted honey. Naturally, bees will store much more honey when built combs are furnished them, but the extracted honey sells more slowly, and at little more than half the price.
They had already prepared more than a hundred section supers,—boxes of the same length and width as the brood-chamber, but only half the depth,—each containing thirty-two sections with foundation. One of these was set accurately on the top of each of the seventy colonies selected to gather the fancy crop. The deep, extracting supers of built combs were distributed among the rest of the bees.
Carl and Alice worked hard all that day and for part of the next forenoon, putting on the supers. The weather was hot and moist, splendid honey weather. More and more of the pale raspberry blossoms were opening, though as yet the honey-flow was barely at its start.
That evening Alice peeped into some of the newly placed supers, irresistibly curious to know what the bees had done. The supers of combs were full of the insects, cleaning out the cells and varnishing them ready for honey-storage, and here and there was even a glistening patch of fresh honey. In the supers of sections no combs were yet built of course; but the bees were clustering there in masses, and evidently preparing for work in earnest.
All looked most promising, but both she and Carl knew that everything depended on the weather from day to day. For the honey-flow is the most capricious thing in the world. If the weather is too wet, the bees cannot work, and the honey is washed out of the blossoms. If it is too dry, the secretion of nectar in the flowers will cease altogether. A cold spell, too, will check the honey-flow, and high winds will dry it up. Often the clouding over of the sky, or a shift in the wind will produce a heavy flow or stop one. It is regulated by faint differences of temperature and moisture, and the ideal weather is warm and damp, with, if possible, a suggestion of thunderstorm in the air. In such a day a good colony of bees will often bring in ten pounds or more of honey, so that Alice and Carl had figured that every good day would be worth easily a hundred dollars.
The next morning was warm, and the bees worked merrily. Now that the honey-flow had started, they were no longer cross. Their owners could walk up and down the rows of hives, through the clouds of flying bees that came almost as thick as snowflakes, and there was scarcely any danger of being stung. Carl was standing in the midst of this activity, observing the flight with satisfaction, when a volley of bees suddenly poured with a loud roaring from one of the hives nearest him.
“Swarm, Alice!” he yelled.
It was the first swarm of that season, and of course it came from one of the strongest colonies. Carl marked the hive that had sent it out and turned his attention to the bees in the air.
For some seconds the cloud of insects swirled round and round, then it drifted slowly toward the cabin. Finding no place to alight there, it floated irresolutely about in one direction and another, and finally moved down toward the river, flying about twenty feet from the ground.
Here it suddenly concentrated by a small cedar tree. A few bees settled on the tip of a long branch; in a moment there was a brown cluster, growing as he looked at it, and in five minutes the branch was bending down under the weight of a mass of bees that would nearly have filled a five-gallon pail.
“What a tremendously big swarm!” exclaimed Alice, who had come to look at it. “Did you see the hive they came from? Then let’s attend to it, and then we can hive the swarm.”
When they removed the cover of the hive that had swarmed, the super was seen to be nearly empty of bees, though it contained a good deal of fresh honey. Lifting it off, they saw that the brood-chamber also appeared sadly depleted. Fully two-thirds of the bees had gone with the swarm.
“Isn’t there any way of keeping them from swarming, Alice?” asked Carl. “We’d get so much more honey if the colonies didn’t break in two like this.”
“None,” Alice replied, busy with the smoker. “Except by seeing that they always have plenty of storage room for honey. They don’t usually swarm till they get crowded. This colony was probably feeling crowded before we put the super on it; they got the swarming idea fixed, and when the honey-flow started well, away they went.”
Meanwhile Alice was taking out one comb after another, glancing at each and replacing it, till she came at last to the most marvelous thing in the world of bees—the mystery of the queen-cells.
There they were, five or six on a single comb, great, peanut shaped protuberances, some sealed with a rounded capping, others still open at the tip, showing the white young queen within, floating in a mass of royal jelly.
For when the bees become queenless, they have the science to rear a new one to save the colony from perishing. An ordinary worker-egg that is just hatching into the larva is profusely fed with royal jelly, that strangely prepared food of which no one knows the exact composition. Instead of growing in the ordinary cell, the larva is given one of these great waxen cones for its nursery; and instead of hatching in twenty-one days into a worker bee, it hatches in sixteen into a fully fledged virgin queen. The first preparation for swarming is the starting of a batch of these queen-cells, so that the colony shall not be left queenless when the queen departs with the swarm, and the swarm does not leave till some of the cells are sealed over.
Whenever a queen loses her life, or grows so old as to be useless, the same sort of queen-cells are started to replace her. The only exception is when a queen dies in the winter, and there are no eggs from which a new one can be reared; and then, unless man gives help, the colony quickly vanishes.
Carl had seen queen-cells often enough before, but he never ceased to regard them with amazement. He peeped into an unsealed cell, took out a little of the thick, white, royal jelly and tasted it on the end of a twig.
“Rich, thick, sour, and sweet all at once,” he commented. “It turns a worker into a queen. I wonder what it would do to me if I ate a lot of it.”
“You’d be a king,” said Alice, promptly. “Put those cells back. They’ll get chilled. And let’s go and catch that swarm.”
Carl had a number of hives prepared for such emergencies, each with ten new frames of foundation. The old hive, now out of action, they carried away to a new stand, and placed the prepared hive where it had stood. Upon it they put the partly-filled super that the swarm had left.
Alice now brought out the large water-pail from the house, and they walked down to where the swarm was settled. It still clung there in a big, brown, murmuring, pearl-shaped mass. There they would probably hang for hours, till they had decided in their mysterious councils what hollow tree in the forest they would make for.
But they were not to leave man’s control. Carl climbed a little way into the tree, then, leaning far out, slipped the tin pail close under the swarm and shook the branch smartly. With a thump the whole mass dropped into the pail, not a bee flying. They seethed and flowed like molasses, while Carl hastily jumped down, ran to the hive he had prepared, and poured them down at its entrance.
They began to crawl in at once, and among the rest Alice caught sight of the queen just entering the hive with a mass of bees. This meant definite possession being taken. Immediately the bees spread over the entrance-board began to “fan.” The swarm was safely hived.
A new swarm usually works with great vigor, knowing that it has a great deal of time to make up, and this one might be expected to finish the super. The parent colony was now out of action; but it would hatch out a new queen in a week, and would build up strong again before fall.
“We must really do something to keep swarming down,” said Alice, anxiously. “Of course, we want to increase our bees, but if the colonies break up now, it will cut our honey crop in two. And we must get the honey.”
“Nothing to do, then, but to go all through them and see if any more are starting queen-cells,” replied Carl. “It’s rather a big job, though, and I wish Bob were here to help us.”
However, it was not necessary to tear all the hives open. Some, they knew, were too weak to think of swarming. With others it was sufficient to glance at the entrance and into the super to make sure of the steady, contented activity. About twenty they went through thoroughly, and in five of them they found the beginnings of queen-cells—an acorn-shaped cup, with an almost microscopic larvæ in it surrounded by royal jelly. These they tore down at once, and marked the hives for close watching in future.
Next morning they continued this inspection, and three swarms came out while they were at work. One of them settled in the top of such a high tree that it could not be reached. They had to let it stay, and late that afternoon it took wing again and made off, across the woods, out of sight.
The others they hived successfully, and they made all possible haste to look through all the suspicious colonies for signs of swarming. Despite all efforts, however, the bees seemed to be getting ahead of them, and they were working frantically when a voice hailed them from the direction of the river:
“Hello, busy bees!”
Bob was coming up through the willows from the direction of the river, and, dropping everything, they rushed to meet him in delight and astonishment.
“How in the world did you get here? Where’s your wagon? You didn’t walk?” cried Carl.
Bob waved his hand triumphantly toward the river. He had come from Morton by water, in a second-hand boat that he had bought cheaply in the village. It was not beautiful; it was a homemade affair, which could be poled, paddled, or rowed, or perhaps sailed too. It was old and rough and needed painting badly, but it was water-tight and had cost only nine dollars. Alice was enchanted; a boat was what she had been longing for most of all.
Bob had had rather a hard up-stream pull, for he brought quite a cargo with him besides his trunk—potatoes, dried apples, prunes, butter, flour, and two more cases of bee-supplies.
“And here’re your queens,” he added, taking a package from his pocket.
There were seven mailing-cages, six tied in one parcel, and the other, containing the three-dollar breeding queen, by itself. Carl looked through the wire gauze cover at this valuable insect, surrounded by her attendants.
“She doesn’t look any bigger or better than the rest of them,” he complained.
“Wait till we see how she performs,” said Alice, hopefully.
The mailing-cages were small, hollowed-out wooden blocks, covered on one side with wire cloth; each contained an Italian queen, with half a dozen attendant bees, that had traveled all the way in the mail-bags from Tennessee. One small compartment in each cage was filled with soft candy, and most of this had been eaten on the journey.
As these queens had already been too long confined, Alice at once made preparations for introducing them—a matter of no small difficulty. For a colony of bees, even if deprived of their queen, will not easily accept a strange one. They prefer the more lengthy plan of raising a batch of queen-cells, and will kill any new queen put into the hive. Sometimes, however, they can be thrown into a panic by smoking and beating on the hive, and the new queen slipped in while they are too demoralized to notice her. The more common plan, however, is the one that Alice adopted.
She had already selected seven colonies where the queens appeared to be laying badly, and she now searched these queens out and killed them. Tearing off a strip of pasteboard on one end of a mailing-cage, she revealed a small hole plugged with soft honey-candy; then she pushed the cage into the hive, down between the combs. The bees would at once eat out the candy, thus opening the hole and releasing the queen, and the sweet would put them in a good humor, so that they would be likely to accept her without trouble.
All but one of the seven were safely introduced. The seventh was found next morning dead in front of the hive where the bees had thrown her body out. Luckily it was not the three-dollar queen.
Late that afternoon it rained a little, and the next day was hot and muggy. It was perhaps the best honey day of the whole season. The bees were almost frantic over the abundance of sweet. The apiary roared like a huge mill. Carl, who had gone fishing, declared that he could hear it a quarter of a mile away. Long after dark the apiary still roared sonorously from every hive, where the bees were fanning furiously with their wings, driving currents of air between the combs to ripen the fresh honey. Bob looked into the supers after flying had ceased, and reported that many of the combs were entirely full of sparkling honey, clear as water. Of course, it was still unripe and unsealed, and would need the care of the bees for some time before taking on the rich, thick consistency of finished honey, ready to be sealed.
For the time being the apiarists had checked the swarming and had a few days of leisure. Now and again a swarm did come out despite all precaution, but they caught nearly all of these, so that there was a fresh row of new colonies being built up.
Then a succession of chilly days cut the honey-flow short. The bees turned sulky and cross. It was impossible to go among the hives without being stung, but after the third day honey began to come in slowly once more.
Strawberries were now ripe, and could be picked in the greatest profusion. Alice gathered them daily; so did the boys, and in fact for a few days they ate hardly anything else. Alice longed to make jam, but had no jam-pots.
Carl went out one morning to pick berries, but returned within an hour, looking disturbed. In one hand he held his half-filled pail, and in the other a rusty tin pan.
“What do you think of this, Bob?” he demanded.
The pan was half full of some dark fluid, at which his brother sniffed carefully.
“Maple syrup,” he pronounced.
“Yes, and something else. See that green sediment? That’s Paris green. I found the pan under the bushes, just beyond the hives.”
“Poison!” cried Alice. “Why, it must have been meant to kill the bees!”
“I guess Mr. Larue was trying to get revenge for his sore leg,” said Carl, grimly. “This must have been laid some days ago, for there’s rainwater in it. Luckily the bees won’t touch any other sweet when they’re getting honey.”
In his first wrath, Bob declared that he would take his gun, go down to the squatter’s cabin, and accuse him of the trick; but their calmer judgment decided that it was best to let the matter pass unnoticed. So it would probably have passed, but for a chance encounter of Carl’s a few days later.
He was going through the woods with his shotgun, and came upon a trout brook about a mile from the cabin—a stream well known to him, though he seldom fished there. He was quietly following up the bank when he perceived Larue a few yards in front of him. The squatter was smoking a clay pipe and angling industriously with a short rod. A double-barrelled shotgun stood against a tree behind him.
They sighted each other almost simultaneously, and for a moment stared at one another in surprise and distrust.
“W’at you want?” said the half-breed. “You try to creep up on me, eh?”
“I didn’t know you were here,” said Carl. “But, look here, you’d better not try to kill any more of our bees.”
“Keel your bees? Don’t know w’at you mean.”
“Yes, you do. I found the poison you put out. You could be arrested for that—”
“You have me arrest! Why, I keel you first!” cried Larue.
“Don’t try it. And you keep away from our camp in future. When we hear anything after dark we’re as likely as not to shoot.”
Carl held his gun ready, for he half-expected Larue to attack him. But the squatter did not reach for his weapon; he only assailed Carl with such abuse in mixed French and English that the boy almost lost his temper. He half raised his gun, and then, as good sense came back to him, lowered it quickly.
“We don’t want any trouble with you,” he said, trying to speak coolly. “If we do have any, it’ll be your own fault. But you keep away from our place. Now I’ve warned you.”
He stepped back into the cedars and walked away, his ears alert for any suspicious sound behind him. But as he cooled down he felt that he had acted most injudiciously; and he felt, in fact, so annoyed with himself that he determined not to mention the matter when he got home.
It took him some time, however, to calm his irritation to this extent, and meanwhile he walked rapidly and rather aimlessly through the woods toward the northwest. He was thinking of anything but his directions, when he came upon the remains of an old road, probably a disused timber-road that might lead to Morton. Following this for a couple of hundred yards, he came in sight of a little lake that he had never seen before.
It was about two miles wide and contained one small, rocky islet. Fire and storm seemed to have swept the shores, for they were covered for more than a hundred yards from the water with tangled dead wood, ricks of underbrush, sprouting second growths, and raspberry canes everywhere. In fact there seemed to be square miles of wild raspberry around the lake. It was covered with bloom, but not a bee did he see. There was no necessity for their bees to travel so far as this to find all the raspberry bloom they wanted.
“What a magnificent spot for an apiary!” Carl reflected, as he gazed about him.
In addition to the raspberries, Carl noticed on a little rise of ground near him, a whole grove of large basswood trees. It was too early for their bloom, but he was going over to inspect them when something seemed to strike him heavily on the head.
The boy dropped in his tracks, and probably for several minutes he lay unconscious. He came to himself feeling dazed and sick, with a dim idea that some one had clubbed him. His mind turned to Larue, as he got weakly to his feet, but no one was anywhere in sight. His hat lay on the ground. He recovered it, and was startled to see two small holes through the crown. At the same time he became aware that blood was running down his forehead.
It flashed upon him that he had been shot and shot through the head! He turned sick and faint at the idea and wondered how he came to be still alive. He hardly dared to put his hand to his head, fearing to find a gaping cavity, but he could not feel exactly what he could call a wound, though there was a very sore spot on the top of his skull. He raked away a good deal of loose hair, and blood was trickling down freely.
He was somewhat reassured at finding the wound was not going to be immediately fatal. Looking at the holes in his hat, he saw that they must have been made by a small-caliber, high-powered, rifle bullet, and this exonerated Larue, for it was a shotgun that the squatter had been carrying. Carl had heard no report; very likely the shot had been fired by some sportsman at a mile distance, perhaps on the other side of the lake. Missing its proper mark, the bullet had driven on till Carl had had the misfortune to come in its way.
He made his way down to the lake and contrived a cold compress on his head with his handkerchief, and began to think of making his way home. He was so dazed, still, that he entirely forgot the old lumber road by which he had come in, and started through the woods in what seemed to be the direction of the cabin.
He felt very weak and sick when he attempted to walk, but he kept going for a long time, till he came out upon a wide, half-burned strip, choked with wild-raspberry vines. A rapid, shallow brook hurried down the middle of the opening.
He had never seen this place before that he could remember, and suddenly it seemed to him that all his directions had gone suddenly wrong. He had not the slightest idea in which direction the cabin lay.
At this moment it occurred to him that he had a pocket compass. He consulted it, tried to think out his position, but his head ached too violently for any mental effort. However, he set out again in a new direction, and, after half an hour’s unsteady walking, came into another raspberry slash—which he presently recognized as the same one he had passed before.
At this new horror added to his pain and weakness, his strength failed entirely. He fell among the flowering canes and lay there for a long time, partly in a sort of stupor, partly in dull anger against the stupid recklessness of men who go into the woods with rifles having an effective range of two miles.
He was parched with thirst and fever, but could hardly summon energy enough to crawl down to the stream. Finally he accomplished it, drank, and dipped his head in the water, and felt refreshed. He was able to think more clearly.
He had his compass; he knew the directions, but he could form no sort of idea whether the cabin lay north, south, east, or west. He could not remember definitely in which direction he had traveled after meeting Larue, and his wanderings since that time had completely confused him.
As he lay there he heard the murmur of bees among the raspberry blossoms. They were probably his own bees, he reflected dimly, and he envied them their wings and their instinct that led them straight home across the forest. And then it struck him that he could not possibly be more than two miles from home, or the bees would not be working there in such numbers.
He thought he saw a chance of help. A laden bee flies home in a proverbially straight line. He watched the insects as they crawled over the blossoms and finally rose laden into the air. They circled, rising in spirals, and then darted across the open space and over the tree-tops. It was easy to follow the black specks for some distance against the blue sky.
Carl sighted their course carefully with the compass, took another drink at the stream, and set off on their trail. It was a painful tramp. His head ached excruciatingly, and when by accident he tripped or stumbled, the jar left him weak almost to fainting. A dozen times he sat down to rest and almost despaired of getting anywhere.
It seemed to him that he had walked miles when he came to another raspberry thicket, and here he found the guiding bees again. Again he sighted their course, and they took the same homeward direction as the first had done.
Clearly he was on the right track and, somewhat encouraged, he forced himself ahead again. But in less than fifteen minutes he came out upon the shore of a rapid river.
Here was an obstacle. The stream was fully sixty feet wide and looked deep. Carl wondered how so large a river had existed in the neighborhood, without their having seen it, and began to have doubts as to his course after all. Perhaps these were merely wild bees from some hollow tree. However, he was determined to follow them home. They were crossing the river, and he would have to cross it. He picked up a long, dry cedar pole for a float in case he went out of his depth, and waded in.
Halfway across he stepped into a deep hole, and was immediately carried off his feet by the force of the current. Then he had reason to bless his pole, for it saved him from drowning, though he was rolled over and over and half choked. He managed to recover his footing and scrambled ashore—but on the same side of the river as before.
He was more dazed than ever by the ducking, and he started down the bank to look for a better place to cross. Bees were going over his head in great numbers. The roar was tremendous, and now he noticed that they were crossing the river in both directions, coming and going.
Perhaps, he thought, he was on the right side after all, and he stumbled on for another hundred yards. He encountered a beaten path, followed it, and the woods opened into a clearing. All at once the noise of the bees rose prodigiously, and like a flash the whole landscape turned familiar.
It was home. He saw the roof of the cabin. The bees had led him straight after all. His strength almost failed him in this last lap, but Bob saw him coming and rushed anxiously to meet him.
“What’s the matter?” he cried as he ran up.
“I’ve been shot,” Carl muttered. “Plumb through the head.”
And then he collapsed, so that Bob had to call Alice for help and carry him into the house.
He recovered when they were sponging his head and cutting away the hair to get at his wound. The blood had caked and had stopped its bleeding. It must have looked gruesome, for he heard Alice and Bob discussing how they could get a doctor.
“I don’t know that it’s so bad, after all,” said Bob, after more of Carl’s crown had been washed clean, and after a little more examination he began to laugh.
“Get up!” he said. “You’re not hurt. It’s only a graze, hardly deep enough to draw blood!”
Carl looked astonished and foolish. Alice, who had been pale, but collected, gave Bob a reproachful look, sat down suddenly, and began to cry a little.
“Just a little m-more, though, and he would have been k-killed!” she stammered.
“Yes,” said Bob, more seriously, “half an inch lower, and that bullet might have done for you. How did it happen? Who could have shot at you?”
Carl gave an account of his adventure. As soon as he learned that his deadly wound was only a scratch he felt remarkably better. A good part of his collapse must have been due to pure mental effect. But it was not all imaginary; the graze of a high-powered bullet upon the top of the head was stunning enough, and when he tried to get up he found himself still weak and staggery.
“But I’ve found a superb place for another bee-yard,” he told them. “I don’t think it’s more than three miles from here, and there’s enough raspberry and basswood there for the bees to work themselves to death. It would be a gold mine to us. We ought to move half the bees over there at once.”