THE BAYOU BEES
Bob created a sensation when he returned to the plantation with his
startling story. He had left only the vaguest word as to where he was
going, and Uncle Louis was growing alarmed, and seriously thinking of
a search expedition. Carl was indignant that he had not been allowed
to share in the expedition; such a combination of pirate-fighting and
treasure-hunting might never come his way again; but when the
excitement had subsided a little it was the discovery of Old Dick’s
bees that came to be the subject of interest.
“I can’t imagine why you didn’t count them, Bob!” said Alice with
impatience. “You don’t seem to know anything about them; and after all
the time we’ve spent trying to find those bees—”
“You don’t realize that the whole place was shoulder-deep with a
blackberry jungle that would tear your clothes off,” Bob returned with
equal impatience. “I could barely make out a few gums, but I know
there must have been lots by the number of flying bees. Besides, we
were hunting thieves. We were liable to be shot at any minute. I
wasn’t in a frame of mind just then to crawl into a thicket and count
bee-gums.”
“Well, we’ll have to go right down there, and size the outfit up,”
Alice stated.
“Better wait till Joe can go,” said Bob.
They discussed it again the next day. The season was drawing on fast.
If anything was to be done with the bees that spring it would have to
be done at once. The result was that Bob and Carl decided that, while
waiting for Joe to finish at Burnam’s, they should make a flying trip
of investigation, to ascertain exactly how many bees were there and
what could be done with them. Alice made a violent plea to go with
them, on the ground that she could judge the bees better than anybody,
but she got no support and had to give it up.
To save time, they took the steamer when she returned down the river
again, three days later, and put Uncle Louis’s boat aboard as freight.
It was late at night when the boat arrived at Magnolia, and some time
before dawn when they were aroused to be put off at the River Island.
They got into the rowboat, pulled up close to the land and waited
there rather miserably in the darkness for more than an hour,
uncertain just where they were.
Dawn revealed the low, swampy shores, looking monotonous and strange.
Bob was still uncertain of his whereabouts, but they dropped slowly
down the current and within half an hour arrived at the mouth of the
bayou, which he recognized at once. Up the slow-flowing stream they
rowed for a quarter of a mile, and then Bob pointed out the gray
outlines of the cabin on the rising bank behind the thickets.
They drew the boat up and went ashore, Carl in a high state of
expectation.
“No doubt about the bees, anyway!” he exclaimed.
It was a warm, damp morning and there was a deep roar of flying
insects all about the old cabin. The bees were beginning their day’s
work. Black specks seemed to be streaming up from the budding
berry-thickets, circling through the air, shooting out over the woods.
A returning bee, black as ink, its legs laden with whitish pollen,
alighted gently on Bob’s coat-sleeve, rested a half-minute, and then
proceeded to its hive.
“Sounds like home!” Bob remarked, listening to the humming wings.
The bulk of the old bee-yard, such as it was, evidently lay in the
dense blackberry-patch which occupied nearly a quarter of an acre.
Probably Old Dick had kept his apiary here in a clearing, and the
berry-canes had swamped it, as they always swamp deserted land in the
South. The stubs of a few small dead peach-trees rose above the
jungle, but scarcely anything else was visible.
The boys had come provided with strong pruning-clippers and a hatchet
to cut a path into this tangle, and Carl reached gingerly into the
thorny growth and began to cut. He had taken out a handful or two of
the stalks when he leaped away with a yell, brushing frantically at
his face. A host of bees had boiled up from a log on the ground at his
feet, vicious and fighting-mad at the disturbance.
Carl sheered away and got rid of his assailants, but he took the
precaution to put on a bee-veil, and Bob followed his example, before
they went any farther. The nest which Carl had disturbed was no “gum,”
but merely a hollow log which a swarm must have taken possession of.
He gave it a wide berth, but a few moments later he came upon a real
bee-gum, overturned on its side, but still tenanted by its
inhabitants. About the same time Bob uncovered three hives, made of
rough plank, standing close together.
The boys had no idea of clearing up the whole berry-patch. They wished
merely to get a view of the interior, and, once inside the thicket,
they found progress a little easier. From a slightly elevated spot
they were able to get a partial view. At least twenty gums were in
sight. Some of them were made of sections of hollow log placed on end
and covered with a board; others were tall plank boxes, which seemed
to have rested upon board platforms at one time. Through the thickets
they could dimly distinguish others, some standing upright still, many
of them fallen on the ground, or leaning against one another. Not all
had bees in them. Carl cautiously raised the nearest, peeped in, and
turned it upside down. It was empty and weather-bleached inside and
out. The bees had died and the wax-moth had destroyed every trace of
the comb. But in spite of all losses it was plain that a great number
of Old Dick’s bees still survived.
“Can you make any guess of how many there are?” asked Bob, confusedly.
Nothing but the roughest guess was possible. They penetrated further
into the berry-thicket, cutting away the canes, stumbling over logs,
continually assailed by the irritated insects. But for the strong
veils and oiled gloves they could hardly have held their ground, for
the bees were unaccustomed to man and were nearly as wild and vicious
as hornets. The further the boys went the more it became certain that
the old negro’s apiary must really have been extensive at one time.
Perhaps there had been more than two hundred gums. A space of fifty
yards square seemed to be covered with bee-boxes of all possible
shapes and sizes, and now in every stage of decay. Some of them had
fallen and become almost buried in weeds and rubbish, but the bees had
stuck to their home, filling up the rotted holes with great lumps and
slabs of wax and bee-glue. Some of the plank gums seemed to be held
together almost entirely by the plastered propolis of the bees’ repair
work; there were flyholes at every point, and the Harmans regarded
these edifices with admiration. They had never seen anything like it,
and in the North bees could, of course, never survive a winter in such
a hive. It was hard to make any sort of estimate as to the present
contents of the apiary, but the boys thought that at least fifty of
the old gums still had bees in them.
“At the rate of six pounds of bees to the gum,” said Carl, “there must
be three hundred pounds of live bees here which we can have for
nothing. The dealers would charge us four hundred dollars or so for
them. Then there must be a lot of honey in these old gums—several
hundred pounds, probably, and certainly there’s a lot of beeswax. We
can clear the whole place up, ship the bees North in wire cages in
May, and the honey and wax ought to pay the expenses.”
“So it should,” Bob agreed. “And just think what all these bees would
do on the clover in Ontario next June! They ought to be worth a couple
of thousand dollars, if it was a good season.”
“We’d have to camp here for a month or so. It would be quite like our
first days in the backwoods apiary in Haliburton.”
“I suppose we could fix up Old Dick’s cabin so we could live in it.
Let’s look it over. We barely glanced into it the other day,” said
Bob.
The framework of the old shanty was still fairly sound, being made of
enduring cypress. But many of the boards hung loose from their rusted
nails, and the pine floor of the little veranda was dangerous to step
on. The roof, of home-made split shingles, was in a bad way. The door
hung by one hinge, and the single window was little more than a
shapeless hole. A honeysuckle vine clustered densely over the decaying
pine posts of the veranda and was thrusting its tendrils through the
window.
There was but one room. A great deal of one end of it was occupied by
the big, roughly built stone fireplace. There was the broken wreck of
a bench in a corner, but nothing else by way of furniture, excepting a
sort of cupboard fastened to the wall, closed with a buttoned door.
Bob directed Carl’s attention to the bees and honeycomb exposed on the
ceiling. The insects were active that morning, crawling briskly over
their combs, coming and going through a crack in the boards, and none
of them offered to attack the boys, who watched them with interest.
Indeed, bees will seldom sting when in a room or under cover.
“Pity we couldn’t leave this just as it is! It’s as good as an
observatory hive,” Carl remarked with his face a yard away from the
mass of bees and honey. “But the first time we had a light in here the
bees would all fly into it. We’ll have to cut all these combs off,
and—”
“I believe this thing has bees in it too,” interrupted Bob, who was
trying to open the door of the old cupboard.
The door gave a little, and let out a trickle of brownish honey, and
three or four excited bees. The insects buzzed about for a moment, and
then found their way outdoors, and, examining the exterior of the
cabin, the boys found a hole through the boards opposite the cupboard.
There was a stream of entering and returning bees, and it was evident
that a flourishing colony dwelt there. Returning to the cabin, they
presently discovered still another colony snugly established between
the inner boards and the studding of the wall.
“Why, this place is full of ’em!” cried Carl, looking about rather
wildly.
“The more the better!” Bob laughed. “I’ll bet anything there’s a swarm
somewhere up the chimney too.”
The chimney was built up on the outside of the cabin, and made of
crossed sticks heavily plastered with clay. Carl put his head into the
fireplace and gazed upward.
“You’re right,” he said. “The chimney’s blocked half-way up, and I can
hear the bees and smell ’em. We’ll never be able to get them out of
that without killing them.”
“Dick’s gums must have swarmed and swarmed,” said Bob. “Joe told me
that the more swarms these gum-keepers get the better they like it.
There must have been hundreds of swarms every summer, especially after
the old nigger went away and the bees had no sort of attention. I
expect they filled up every hollow tree within reach. It’s a wonder
they didn’t overrun the whole country.”
“Why, yes! There must be lots of bee-trees close by here,” Carl
exclaimed. “I never thought of it, but let’s look for them. They’re
just as good as the gums.”
They did not have far to look. Just behind the cabin they found a
colony in a decayed stump, and another in a hollow gum-tree within
twenty yards. Bob made the curious discovery of a swarm living in an
old keg half covered with brushwood; the bees were flying through the
open bung-hole. There were three more bee-trees a little way up the
slope toward the spring, and down by the bayou they found apparently
two swarms living in the same tree.
“The woods are certainly full of ’em!” said Bob. “Very likely there
are more bees around here in the trees than Old Dick ever had in his
gum-yard.”
Carl stopped on the slope, surveyed the berry-thickets, the cabin, the
jungly landscape for some minutes with an air of reflection.
“Bob,” he said in a weighty manner at last, “do you think this is a
good bee district? Lots of honey-bearing plants?”
“Yes, I should say so,” replied his brother. “When we went through the
swamps the other day we weren’t thinking much about honey plants, but
there’s titi and willow along all the streams. I know I’ve seen
hundreds of tupelo and black-gum trees. They yield honey in immense
quantities, and will be blooming within the next six weeks. As for
blackberry, you can see for yourself what a lot there is, and it makes
the finest and whitest honey in the world. It’s just coming into bud.
Why, what are you thinking about?”
“Just this,” said Carl. “We can’t do anything with these gums in their
present shape. We couldn’t handle them: we couldn’t drive the bees out
into our shipping-cages without wasting as much as we got. We’ll have
to transfer all these bees into new, regular hives anyway. Why can’t
we transfer them, rear Italian queens for them all, and turn this
whole wreck into a modern outfit? Then late in May we can take a pound
or two of bees out of every hive and ship them home, and still leave a
working force with the hive here. We’d get a crop of honey here, and
then another one up North. And we’d still have the bees here, so that
we could go on doing the same thing year after year, shipping a
hundred packages of bees to Canada every spring till we had all we
could possibly handle. What do you think?”
Bob gazed at his younger brother somewhat staggered at this large
scheme.
“How about the cost of putting all that through?” he said at last.
“We’d have to have hives, brood-frames by the thousand, an extractor,
a regular equipment. And we’ve spent more money down here already than
we expected to.”
“Well, we’ve got cash enough to start with,” Carl returned. “Then
think of the honey and wax we’ll get when we transfer these gums!
Enough to pay for the new hives. Then there’ll be a regular crop to
extract before we ship any bees. The thing ought to cover expenses as
we go along.”
“Carl, you’re a genius,” said Bob. “You’ll either make us rich or
wreck us. Most likely you’ll wreck us. But let’s explore this place a
little further before we decide.”
They circled about the old cabin more widely, finding two or three
more bee-trees; went over the ridge, and down to the lower ground
where they examined the growths with great interest. Titi and willow
grew profusely, as Bob said; but the bloom-time of these plants was
over. There was a great gallberry marsh, however, a quarter of a mile
from the cabin, due to flower in May; and all the lower ground was a
tangle of the low, creeping, prickly dewberry-plants. These dewberries
and blackberries were at present the most important of the
honey-producing plants, for their honey was of the best quality, and
they would be the next to blossom. Tupelo and gum-trees grew profusely
all over the wet land, and, as Bob said, it looked as if there was
ample pasturage for several hundred colonies.
They ate their lunch near the cabin, discussing the situation, and
then, started to explore the bayou upwards. Carl was anxious to see
the place where the river-men had refined the rosin, and it was highly
desirable to ascertain if these unpleasant customers had left the
neighborhood. Luckily the pirates had seen nobody but Sam during the
affair, so that both boys felt there would be no serious danger even
in a meeting; yet they rowed up the muddy stream with great caution,
and peeped and listened before they ventured to push through the
fringe of drooping green that cut off the houseboat’s old moorage.
But there was nobody on the shore. The mound of ashes was there in the
circle of stones, but the big kettle was gone. The scraps of burlap
strainers seemed to have been burned; the empty barrels were gone.
Nothing was left but the scattered lumps of rosin on the ground. The
houseboat men had evidently been trying to clean up all traces of
their operations.
It was a great relief to find that the pirates had definitely
abandoned the place. Getting aboard again, the boys pushed a little
way further up the bayou, which seemed to extend clear through the
River Island and out to the old channel; but the tangled, half-flooded
shores were so melancholy that they presently dropped down the current
again to the bee-yard. Here they moored the boat, and started to
explore the lower part of the bayou on foot.
The ground was higher here, and the walking dry and good, though
obstructed with blackberry, gallberry, and oak-scrub. They went down
to the mouth of the bayou, then turned inland and came in a circle
back toward the cabin.
The marshes and the strips of creek-swamp compelled them to take a
most crooked course, and at last, tangled in the maze of morasses,
they had to turn back to the river again for a fresh start. It was
clear that they would have to keep to the ridges in future, and they
were skirting along the shore, watching for a possible road inland
when Bob suddenly stopped short, grasping Carl’s arm.
Twenty yards in front a rough rowboat lay on the river bank. A man was
stooping over it, either having just landed or preparing to embark. He
carried a gun in his left hand, and he had neither seen nor heard the
boys.
“One of the pirate bunch?” whispered Carl.
“No, I never saw him,” Bob murmured, after getting a good look at the
boatman. “Likely he’s only hunting here. There’s only one of him
anyway. Let’s go up and see what he says.”
They walked boldly out of the undergrowth and approached the man, who
turned about sharply as he heard them, straightened up, and watched
their approach in silence. He was middle-aged, bearded, and
long-haired; he looked a typical backwoodsman. His clothing was faded
to an indeterminate brown; he wore canvas leggings, and a canvas belt
of shells about his waist, and he held his double-barrel across his
arm.
“Howdy!” called Bob, trying to adopt the local greeting. “Hunting?”
The man looked them over with an appearance of intense surprise and
curiosity. Probably Bob’s Northern accent struck him as peculiar.
“Naw!” he drawled at last, without much amiability. “Ain’t no deer nor
turkey here.”
“We heard it was a good place for game,” said Carl. “Do you live
around here?”
“Naw!” repeated the woodsman. “Don’t nobody live here, I don’t reckon.
I lives ’way ’cross the river. Where do you-all come from?”
“Oh, from away up North,” Bob told him.
“I shore thought you was some kind of Yankees. Now what you fixin’ to
do round here? You ain’t huntin’?”
“Hunting a little—fishing—looking around,” Carl explained. “We want to
see the country. We’re from Canada, and we never saw anything like
this before.”
“I wouldn’t think you’d ever want to see it again,” said the man. He
took a corn-cob pipe from his pocket and lighted it, and looked at the
boys with a little less suspicion. “This here’s the wustest place in
the hull state of Alabamy. Ain’t no deer here, no birds, nothin’ but
snakes an’ mosquitoes an’ chills-an’-fever, an’ alligators.”
“Lots of snakes and mosquitoes, I guess,” Carl laughed, “but we
haven’t seen any alligators.”
“Heaps of ’em, when it gits a little warmer. I shoots ’em in the
summer for their hides. But them ain’t the wust. There’s wildcats an’
bears. But them ain’t the wust neither. Back yander a mile or so the
woods is full of the raginest, pizenest wild bees that anybody ever
seed. Don’t you-all go near ’em.”
“Oh, we’ve seen them,” said Bob, smiling. “They won’t bother us. We’re
used to bees.”
“Used to ’em, are ye?” cried the woodsman. “Well, you ain’t used to no
such bees as these here bees. Nobody durstn’t go near ’em. They killed
a nigger once. He tried to rob a little honey off ’em and they done
killed him. Yes, sir! Eat him alive, I reckon, for nobody never seen
him again. The place is full of bones of hawgs an’ polecats an’
rabbits an’ mebbe bears that them pizen bees jest nachrally killed.
You-all better not fool with ’em!”
“Thanks!” said Bob. “We’ll certainly look out for them. What’s your
name? If you’re around this way we’ll see you again, perhaps.”
“My name’s Candler,” said the hunter doubtfully. “But you-all better
not come by here no more. It ain’t safe. Nothin’ here but snakes an’
pizen bees, an’ they say there’s some mighty rough humans in these
here swamps, too.”
Candler was rough enough himself, they thought, but he did not look
quite like a river pirate. They bade him good-by and left him busied
with his boat, while they retraced their path for some distance, and
finally found a passable road up to the high ground again and back to
the old cabin. Here they sat down to rest, and watched the “pizen
bees.”
They were not vicious that afternoon. There was a good honey-flow, and
they were far too busy to think of fighting. A heavy hum and roar
pervaded the air. Bees were coming down in streams, dropping heavily
laden into the blackberry cover, streaming out again back to the honey
sources in the swamps. Tired bees with great pollen-balls fell and
rested on the ground; out of the cracks in the old cabin bees flew as
if from a beehive. The sun shone bright; the air was hot and damp, and
the boys sat for a long time in silence and watched their prospective
apiary. As Bob said, it seemed like home.
“We’ll do it, Carl!” he exclaimed at last. “We’ll build this old ruin
up into something valuable, and we’ll make a permanent fixture of it.
It’ll be worth a thousand dollars a year to us to have this yard to
ship a fresh lot of bees and queens North every spring.”
“Hurrah! Of course it will!” cried Carl. “Alice’ll be tickled to death
when she hears of this scheme. And it’ll give Joe a chance to come in
too, if he wants to. We’d rather need somebody to keep an eye on these
bees while we were up North.”
Bob looked at his watch.
“Let’s get into the boat and start back!” he proposed. “If we’re going
to put this big job through, there isn’t an hour to lose!”