again and again carl hammered at the door. at last some one raised a window in the second story, and a voice called down rather crossly through the darkness.
“it’s harman!” carl cried. “i’ve come to pay your money.”
“too late. i’m abed,” answered mr. farr. “come in to-morrow.”
“not much!” retorted carl. “it’s due before midnight to-day, and you said you wouldn’t give me an hour’s extra time. i’m not taking any chances. i’m afraid you’ll have to get up.”
mr. farr chuckled and left the window. they heard him stirring about, and presently saw the light of a lamp. in a few minutes he opened the front door and conducted them into the sitting-room. his hair was tousled, and he was in his stocking-feet and looked older and more wizened than ever, but something seemed to be amusing him greatly.
carl produced the telegraph check. mr. farr scrutinized it carefully, chuckled once more, wrote a receipt, and gave them a check of his own in change.
“i’m obleeged for the money,” he said, smiling broadly, “but you needn’t have been in such an all-fired hurry with it.”
“it was your fault,” carl explained. “you said, you know—”
“yes, i know, and i expect the joke’s on me at having to get up in the middle of the night like this. but the law gives you three days of grace, you know. and besides, you can’t foreclose a mortgage without giving thirty days’ notice. you had a whole month to pay in. guess you ain’t studied mortgage law. that’s why i wouldn’t take your ten dollars a day for an extension, and i was having my quiet laugh to see you so flustered and worrited, when you wasn’t in no danger at all.”
“but—but i thought—” carl stammered.
“that i’d grab the bees away from you to-morrow? foreclosing a mortgage is a slower business than that. now you think i’m a pretty hard customer, don’t you?”
carl blushed.
“well, i’ll tell you now that i never foreclosed but one mortgage in my life, and that was on a farm where i hadn’t got no interest for three years, and the fellow was boasting that dave farr’d never get a cent out of him. foreclosed on him, i did; but i’d have no more shut down on young people like you than i’d have sold myself out.”
“i’m sorry, mr. farr! we didn’t understand—either the business, or you!” cried alice, and she held out her hand impulsively.
“that’s all right, young lady. you didn’t know nothing about business, of course, and i did, that’s all. i oughter have told you how you stood instead of laughing, and it serves me right to be got up out of bed at this time of night. and now my sleep’s broke up, i’ll have a chaw, and you can tell me how your investment panned out.”
mr. farr produced a black plug of tobacco from inside the clock, bit off a piece and disposed himself to listen. carl briefly outlined their fortunes, and told of the trouble they had had with larue. mr. farr laughed heartily at the expedient of the robber bees.
“i see you young people are as sharp as they make ’em!” he said. “just think of sending them bees to bring back their own honey! but i know baptiste larue—known him for years. he ain’t such a bad fellow, lazy and steals a little, and if you play him a bad trick he’ll get back at you sure as fate. that’s the indian in him; and if you do him a good turn he’ll never forget it, and that’s the indian too, i guess. pity you’ve got at loggerheads with him. better try to straighten it out. i’ll have a talk with him when i see him, and maybe i can help to straighten things out.”
they went back to the hotel to sleep that night with the feeling that an enemy had suddenly been transformed into a friend. mr. farr promised to help them in every way he could; at the same time he was careful to assure them that business was business, and he would still hold them to the strict letter of the mortgage. but this time alice laughed, and he did not seem offended.
they expected bob to come up on the train next morning, but he failed to arrive. it seemed unwise to remain away from the bee-yard any longer, so they embarked immediately for the voyage up the river.
it was a fine, sunny morning. the rains had broken the drought, and the air was full of the moist heat that makes good honey weather, but the raspberry bloom was long since over.
the harvest was past; the bee-season was practically done, and they had saved themselves, if only by the skin of their teeth. now that the money was paid, they both felt the reaction from the strain and fatigue of the last weeks. the thought of their finances depressed them. they had not two hundred dollars in the world.
“if we’d only had some more of this weather a month ago!” said carl.
“yes, it would have meant hundreds of dollars. but there’s no hope of anything more from the bees this year,” alice replied.
“worse than nothing! for we’ll probably have to feed them sugar to winter on, perhaps a hundred dollars’ worth. it’ll leave us nearly broke, i’m afraid. alice, we’ll have to go to the city this winter and do as i proposed.”
they rowed up the river for a long way in silence. then alice, trying hard to speak hopefully, said, “anyhow, we’ve got a lot of valuable property, and next year—”
“hark!” carl interrupted. “what’s that?”
he had stopped rowing, and there was dead silence in the wilderness. a jay called noisily from a treetop, and then again silence fell. after a minute, as alice listened, she seemed to hear a deep, murmurous hum from the woods along the shore.
“it sounds like bees,” she said, doubtfully.
“it is bees!” affirmed carl after listening a little longer. “it must be our bees. but what are they after? how far are we from home?”
alice thought they were about two miles. they had passed indian slough some time before.
“i do hope they’re not after larue again,” said carl. “but most likely they’ve found a wild bee-tree and are robbing it.”
but after a few minutes carl grew so curious that he went ashore and tried to follow the flight of the bees, which could now be seen passing overhead. presently alice heard him calling her, in great excitement.
she hastened after him. he was standing at the edge of a great burned slash that extended for fully two miles. it was studded with charred, spike-branched trees and second-growth hemlock, tangled with berry bushes, and choked with quantities of a weed that grew three feet or more high and bore spikes of brilliant, crimson-pink flowers.
on the nearest spike of blossoms alice saw three or four bees, and from the whole tract resounded the deep, busy hum that they had heard from the river.
“d’you know what that is?” shouted carl, dancing with exultation. “willow-herb! fireweed! what do you think of that?”
alice also recognized it. willow-herb—also known as “fireweed,” because it always springs up in the track of forest fires—is one of the best honey-yielding plants in america. it flowers in late summer, and lasts until frost kills it, secreting nectar heavily whenever the weather is at all favorable. a single colony of bees has been known to gather the almost incredible amount of four hundred pounds of honey from this plant alone. it does not grow in the settled portions of the country, and as the harmans had never seen it in profusion, they had never thought of including it among their prospective resources.
“o carl!” cried alice. “we may get a big crop after all! let’s hurry home and see what the bees are doing.”
burning with impatience, they hurried up the river as fast as the heavy old tub could be driven against the stream. without waiting to tie the boat, they ran to the apiary. the air was full of a heavy roar. bees were coming in by thousands and dropping on the hive-entrances. it was like the best days of the raspberry flow. carl seized his sister by the waist and joyously hugged her.
“it seems too good to be true! if it only lasts! won’t bob be astonished when he gets here?”
bob did not arrive till late the next afternoon. he had walked all the way from morton to save the expense of a conveyance and he was very tired. he had also probably been meditating on their financial state, for he seemed depressed; but carl and alice said nothing at once about the sudden change in their prospects.
the bees had ceased flying for the day, but from all the hives, where the new honey was being ripened, came a heavy roar. after supper bob walked out towards the hives and noticed it. he stopped to listen, and scrutinized the entrances closely.
“been feeding them?” he asked at last, with a perplexed look.
“no,” answered carl, gravely.
“surely they can’t have been gathering anything, can they?”
“gathering anything!” carl burst out, unable to hold the secret any longer. “i guess those bees have gathered about a thousand pounds of honey in the last two days. the fireweed is in bloom, bob. we never thought of that, did we? there are miles of it! it yields honey by the ton, and if we just get regular rains we’ll have our eighteen-hundred-dollar crop yet.”
bob could hardly believe the news till he had looked into some of the supers himself, where great patches of clear, white honey already showed. then his enthusiasm knew no bounds.
“i was just beginning to think we’d been fools to go into this apiary game,” he exclaimed. “but this puts a different color on the thing. if we only get the right weather, now!”
for the next three days the weather was indeed perfect, and the bees did marvelously well. a visit to the new apiary by the lake showed that the colonies there were also storing heavily and needed supers. they had never expected this yard to yield any surplus honey this season, but the bees were actually crowding the queen out of the combs with the rush of new honey.
“we’ll have to get a team and have a load of supers hauled over,” said alice. “one thing’s certain—next season we must have a horse and wagon of our own. we must have paid out over fifty dollars for team-hire this summer, and now we’ll have to have all these supers hauled home again for extracting.”
however, they had to have a quantity of lumber brought out from morton to make winter cases for the increased number of colonies, and the teamster moved the load of supers while he was there. the management of the bees during this late honey-flow was simple. bees rarely swarm after midsummer, and they only needed to be let alone to fill their empty combs with the honey from the willow-herb, whose crimson spikes were visible everywhere. exploring the woods the apiarists found it in immense quantities in every burned slash; they had seen the green plants often enough during the summer, but had not recognized it until it came in bloom. there appeared to be forage for hundreds of colonies.
raspberries were ripe now, and the harmans gathered quarts. they might have gathered barrels, if they had had any means of disposing of them. they ate them in every possible manner—raw, stewed, in pies, but mainly with fresh, extracted honey poured over them, which they found to be a dish worthy of any epicure’s attention. alice also made a great quantity of jam with some sugar that was left from the spring feeding, and filled up all the remaining honeypails.
it was the fruitful season of the wilderness. game was growing more plentiful. the woods and streams were full of the new broods of partridges and ducks, strong-winged now and wary. hares were everywhere, and once, while picking berries, carl caught a glimpse of a black bear. it was only a glimpse, for the bear vanished like lightning, but carl carried a rifle after that when he went for berries.
he carried it in vain, but it occurred to him that the lakeside apiary was terribly exposed to a bear’s depredations, and he carried the big trap over there, and set it among the hives. he found the yard in perfect safety, and the bees storing honey fast in nearly all the supers.
all through the latter part of august the weather remained warm and clear. not much rain fell, but light showers came often enough to keep the fireweed from drying up, and the bees were busily at work almost every day. and now alice set to work to improve the breed of the bees by queen-rearing operations.
to transform a black colony into italians, it is only necessary to exchange their queen for an italian queen. in the course of a couple of months the old generation of black bees will all have died, and all the newly hatched brood will be the offspring of the italian mother. but alice could not afford to buy any more queens, and she had determined to rear them herself.
the rearing of thoroughbred queens is a special art in itself. any colony, if deprived of its queen, will raise a number of queen-cells to produce another, but these cells will of course be from eggs laid by the old queen, and the new queen will be of the same breed. to change the breed it is necessary to manœuver a substitution without the bees being aware of it.
alice began by killing the queen of one of the black colonies that had proved bad-tempered and a poor honey-gatherer. for four days, then, she let the hive alone. at the end of that time she went over all the combs and cut out every queen-cell that had been started.
this produced terrible consternation in the hive. there were no larvæ now in the hive young enough to produce a queen, for queen-cells cannot be raised from a larva more than three days old. the bees ran about the entrance in consternation, and the loud, shrill buzzing of their despair could be heard across the contented hum of the normal colonies. but alice was already taking measures for their relief.
she prepared a flat stick an inch wide, just long enough to fit inside an empty brood-frame. upon this stick she stuck a dozen little cups of molded beeswax, much the size and shape of an acorn cup, and into each cup she put a little lump of the white royal jelly taken from the queen-cells that she had destroyed. this operation is called “priming” the cells. the next step was to graft them.
for some time alice and the boys had been carefully watching the egg-laying work of the italian queens that they had bought, and they had already selected the two that seemed best to use as breeders. neither of these, it should be said, was the famous three-dollar queen. in actual performance she was outstripped by several of the ordinary one-dollar sort.
from the hive of the best breeding queen alice selected a comb containing eggs and just hatched young larvæ. these little larvæ were almost invisible, tiny white worms no larger than the comma on a page of print, floating in milky food at the bottom of each cell. it was delicate work to touch them, but with the point of a hairpin alice fished out one of these for each of the primed artificial cells, laying it carefully down in the royal jelly. hurriedly, then, lest the incipient queens should be chilled, she put this stick of cell-cups into the unfortunate queenless colony.
next morning she went to look at it. out of the dozen cells the queenless bees had accepted ten, were drawing the cells out already into the usual peanut shape, and had fed the larvæ large quantities of additional royal jelly. all was going well, and alice proceeded to prepare a fresh set of cups for another colony.
it takes twelve days for a queen to hatch after the cell has been started in this manner. early on the twelfth day, alice selected the twelve colonies in most need of requeening, went through the combs, found the queens and killed them.
about three hours later she put into each of these hives one of her grafted cells, now on the point of hatching. in one case, indeed, the cell hatched in her fingers, and a beautiful, yellow, italian virgin queen emerged.
in ten or twelve days more, all these young queens would be mated and laying, and these colonies could be considered italian for the future—italian, at least on the mother’s side, for the worker-bees would also be affected by the drone parentage.
queen-rearing can only be carried on during a honey-flow, and while the good fireweed flow lasted, alice raised several dozen queen-cells. all did not go smoothly, of course. sometimes the bees refused to accept the artificial cells, tearing them down as fast as they were given; once a young queen hatched prematurely, and her royal jealousy immediately caused her to demolish all the rest of the cells on the frame, tearing out her young sisters and stinging them to death. some queens were also lost on their mating flight, but in all alice succeeded, with the help of the boys, in requeening about fifty colonies.
by this time most of the colonies had filled an extracting super apiece. some had filled two. nearly all the damaged sections of comb had been put back on the hives, and the bees had refilled them with alacrity, sealing them over as white and smooth as if they had been freshly built. there would be a good deal of section honey to sell after all.
“i don’t believe i ever saw a honey-flow last so well,” said alice. “it surely can’t go on much longer, and i’m almost afraid to look out every morning, for fear it’s over.”
they expected frost every day now, but for another full week the weather continued warm and open, and the bees continued to bring in nectar, though in daily-diminishing quantities. then one evening the wind shifted into the north, and the temperature went down, not to frost, but low enough to stop the secretion of nectar. the bees were idle, and that day the tragedy of the drones began. the long steady flow of honey had caused the bees to tolerate them until late, but now their time had come. at every hive-entrance the bees could be seen chasing them, biting and worrying them, driving them out, but seldom stinging. the big, stingless drone is very much afraid of his armed little sisters, and is unable to resist when thrown out of the hive. all day long could be heard the loud buzzing of the drones as they tried in vain to reenter their homes, and the next morning they could be seen by scores, dead in front of the hives, where they had perished of cold and starvation. in a week hardly a drone was left in the apiary.
this meant an end to alice’s queen-rearing, and she took out and destroyed the last set of cells that was under way. it was now too late in the season to kill a queen and attempt to replace her. every effort had to be turned toward getting the colonies into the best condition for winter.
the weather did turn slightly warmer, but the honey-flow did not recommence. then, early one morning, when carl went out to the yard, he found the tops of the hives white with hoar-frost.
“that’s the end of it,” he said. “well, we can’t complain, for it’s lasted wonderfully.”
that day the fireweed flowers hung wilted in the sunshine. the honey-season was certainly over this time. nothing remained to be done now but to extract and sell what was on the hives, but they considered it better to leave it in the supers to ripen for another week.
all the honey at the lakeside apiary would have to be hauled home to be extracted, since there was no extracting-house near or any facilities for doing the work. it was somewhat uncertain how much was there, for they had not visited that yard for about two weeks. it was needful now, however, to make up a close estimate of the amount of honey to be taken off, for they wanted to order the honey-tins to hold the crop. bob offered to go over to the lake and count the supers, and he set off early in the morning, taking his rifle.
it was a beautifully crisp autumn day. squirrels chattered from the trees; partridges roared up from the undergrowth. bob sighted a fresh deer-trail on the old lumber road, but the legal season for deer had not yet opened. he shot a couple of partridges on the way, however, clipping their heads neatly with a bullet, and hung them up on a tree to be picked up on his return.
he was quite a quarter of a mile from the apiary when he became aware of a faint murmur, which he took for the breeze in the tree-tops. but as he advanced it increased to a roar. it sounded like a dozen swarms flying at once. bob was bewildered, then scared, and he began to run.
“it can’t possibly be swarming!” he thought. “surely the bees in this yard haven’t struck a new honey-flow at this time of year.”
breathlessly he came out upon the shore of the little lake. the apiary was in sight. the roar increased to a tremendous volume, but even bob’s ears perceived the difference between the contented hum of a working yard, and this high-pitched, angry, tumultuous note that filled the air.
