REAPING THE HARVEST
A roaring black cloud that looked almost like the vortex of a tornado
swirled over the log barn. There was a smaller cloud hovering about
the house, and the whole clearing was alive with bees, coming and
going, looking for something, all extremely irritable.
Approaching the barn as closely as they dared, they saw that the whole
building was like a vast beehive. The insects covered the logs; they
swarmed in and out of every one of the wide chinks between the
timbers. Myriads were continually emerging and flying off, and myriads
more took their places.
“Gracious!” exclaimed Carl, looking rather wildly at his brother. “I
didn’t know we had so many bees. The honey’s here in the barn all
right.”
“It won’t be here long, at this rate,” returned Bob. “But I wonder
what’s happened to Larue and his family and live stock. Perhaps
they’re all dead!”
The boys really felt seriously uneasy at the overwhelming success of
their scheme. Except for the bees, no living creature was in sight,
but Carl presently spied a dead hen near the barn. Evidently she had
been killed by the bees, and this increased their uneasiness. Bob made
an attempt to reach the cabin, but a host of savage bees drove him
back, despite his veil. The insects were fighting-mad.
The boys crept around the edge of the clearing, keeping in the shelter
of the woods, where the bees did not molest them. They had made about
half the circuit when they caught sight of a heavy cloud of smoke
rising a little way back among the thickets.
“S-sh! There they are!” whispered Bob.
They lay low for a minute, then, hearing no sound, crept up close
enough to gain a view of the camp. The squatter’s family were sitting
dejectedly in the shelter of smoke from a heavy smudge. Larue himself
reclined against a tree, but he was hardly recognizable. Both his eyes
seemed to be swollen shut. He had two big lumps on his forehead, his
lips were puffed, and one ear was twice its rightful size. It was
clear that he was in no fighting condition, and the boys walked up
without any hesitation.
[Illustration: He was plainly in no condition to show fight, and the
boys advanced without hesitation]
“You seem to be having trouble,” said Bob innocently.
The squatter tried to screw his eyes open far enough to get a glimpse
of them.
“_Nom d’un nom!_” he ejaculated, thickly through his swollen lips.
“Dose bees! Dey come—dey swarm—!” and he trailed off into a mixture of
French and English indistinguishably distorted in his puffy mouth.
They could hardly make out a word.
“What’s been happening, Mrs. Larue?” said Carl, turning to the woman.
She also bore marks of stings, and so did the two children.
“Your bees!” she cried. “Dey come in by t’ousands—millions! We stay in
de house—no! _Pas possible!_ Dey kill my two best _poulets_. Kill us
too, if we not get out!”
“What do you suppose they could have been after?” asked Bob.
The woman cast a quick glance at her husband, and said she didn’t
know, but in her queer dialect she gave an excited account of what had
happened—from her point of view.
That forenoon they had suddenly been invaded by a whirlwind of bees.
The family had tried at first to shut themselves up in the house, but
the bees forced an entrance through hundreds of crevices, and they had
had to take to the woods. Larue had been terribly stung while trying
to get a cow out of the barn, and two hens had been killed by the
bees. Afraid to leave cover, the family had been sitting all day under
the smudge-smoke, without food, not daring to go to the house to find
any. She knew, of course, that these were the Harman bees, but the
boys were relieved to find that she seemed to have no sort of
suspicion that the raid had been planned.
“We must get this thing stopped,” whispered Carl, drawing his brother
aside. “The bees’ll kill everything on the place.”
“Yes, and after dark we can carry away the rest of the honey
ourselves,” replied Bob. “These people won’t try to stop us. In fact,
now will be a good time to try to make up a peace with them.”
“You’ll be all right by to-morrow, Mr. Larue,” said Carl,
reassuringly. “Perhaps you know better than we do what attracted the
bees down here, but we’ll try to fix it so they won’t bother you any
more.”
“I move away from zis place!” cried the squatter, energetically. “Ze
bee—he make my life one misery!”
“Well, I’m sorry it happened,” returned Bob. “Here’s a dollar to pay
for your two hens, and we’ll send you some honey—for the children.”
The woman took the dollar bill, muttered a word of thanks, but did not
seem much propitiated. As for stopping the raid, the boys could do
nothing till the bees stopped of themselves for the night. It was
really dangerous to venture out of the shelter of the woods. Even
sunset brought little cessation of the uproar, and it was not till it
was quite dark that the bees gradually ceased to hover about the barn
and cabin.
Bob and Carl then accompanied the Larues to their house, which was
strewn with dead and half-dead bees. On the table were several
unmistakable pieces of section honey, which the boys wisely pretended
not to see. No doubt Larue had brought them in for breakfast, but the
bees had taken all the honey out of the combs. After finishing the
honey, they had licked up everything sweet in the house, including two
quarts of maple syrup and a jar of raspberry jam.
The barefooted children were at once stung by treading on the
stupefied bees that crawled over the floor. Larue flung himself down
on the bed and started up again instantly, with a loud ejaculation.
There were bees in the bed, too. The woman took a broom and began to
sweep the insects out, but the boys judged it more politic not to
stay.
“Can you lend us a lantern?” inquired Bob. “We want to look into the
barn. There’s some honey of ours there that we want to take away. When
it’s gone, the bees will leave you alone.”
“_Oui_, I get you ze lantern,” said the woman. “Look in ze barn. Look
anywhere. But I see no honey. I know nottings about it. I get you
anyt’ing, only you take dose bees away.”
Though the bees had ceased flying, there were many of them still
crawling about the log barn, and in the lantern-light they perceived a
big pile of something lightly covered with hay.
“There it is!” exclaimed Carl, with satisfaction.
It was indeed the stolen shipping cases and supers, and the hay
covering had not prevented the bees from getting at them. At a glance
the honey seemed to be all there. At the worst, not many of the
sections were missing, though the honey was presumably all cleaned out
of them. There were a good many bees still in the boxes, and the floor
was covered with dead insects. Evidently they had fought ferociously
over the plunder.
“Quite a load of stuff to take home in the boat,” remarked Carl, as
they surveyed the rescued honey.
“Yes, but if all the honey is out of it, it won’t be heavy, I fancy,”
said Bob. “I saw an old wheelbarrow around here, and we’ll use it to
take the stuff to the boat. We absolutely must get it all home
to-night, before these people recover from their shock.”
The top cases of honey were indeed light, and seemed to contain
nothing but empty combs—hardly that, in fact, for the wax sifted out
in fine powder, for it had been torn to pieces by the frenzied bees.
But as they went deeper the boxes grew heavier; some of them seemed
almost full weight, though no doubt they were all damaged enough to be
unsaleable.
It took three boat-loads to get the honey back home, and it was hard
and heavy work pulling it up against the current. Alice was jubilant,
and when they came up with the second load she had a supper of bacon,
trout, cold partridge, and hot coffee ready for them. They needed it;
food had never tasted so good; and after finishing everything in
sight, they went back for the last load.
“We ought to bring those six hives of bees home, too,” said Carl,
uneasily.
“I suppose we should, but who cares?” replied Bob. “I’m dead tired,
and I wouldn’t row up that river again for a whole apiary. Larue
doesn’t know where they are. We’ll bring them up at sunrise in the
morning. I’m going to bed.”
But it was then considerably after midnight. The boys overslept, and
did not waken till eight o’clock. The bees at home were flying
already, showing signs of much excitement, and could be seen going
down the river as on the day before. They were still looking for
stolen honey.
“Won’t they hang around and bother the Frenchman again to-day?” Bob
asked.
“I’m afraid so,” said Carl. “But it can’t be helped, and they’ll soon
find that there’s nothing more to be had, and go about their business.
It’ll be better when we get those six hives home.”
It was after nine o’clock when they reached the ambushed hives, and at
the first glance Carl uttered a loud cry of dismay.
“Why, they’re all shot to pieces!”
They both ran up. One hive was overturned, with a great, splintered
hole blown through its side; a second was nearly as bad, and all the
remaining four had been more or less perforated with buckshot. Honey
had run out on the ground, and the bees were crawling about stupidly,
seeming too much disconcerted to gather it up.
“Looks as if Larue had got his eyes open again,” said Carl, as they
surveyed the wreck.
“Yes, and he’s on the warpath!” Bob lamented. “Just when I had planned
to make peace with him! I hoped he’d never find out that we had
engineered this riot, and we’ve paid him for his hens, and I was going
to send him some honey to sweeten him up. And now it’s all off.”
“Well, I don’t believe this is a particularly safe spot for us if he’s
out with his gun,” said Carl. “Let’s get these hives moved away.”
First Bob peeped through the thickets into the clearing. A good many
bees still hung about the barn and cabin, and no doubt they were
fiercely cross at finding no honey where they had expected it. There
was no sign of the French family; very likely they were under their
smudge again.
“I can’t say I blame Larue for being mad,” said Bob, “after being
driven out of his house for two days running. I suppose he expected to
find all quiet this morning, and it’s almost as bad as ever. Then he
found these hives and he naturally bombarded them.”
“Well, if he hadn’t brought our honey down here it wouldn’t have
happened!” returned Carl, hard-heartedly. “He’ll bombard us, too, if
we hang around here long.”
They carried the dilapidated hives down to the boat with a good deal
of difficulty, and rowed them up-stream. Two of them were ruined, but
it was likely that the bees themselves and the combs would do very
well if lodged in fresh hives. The outfit was nearly double its former
weight and a later investigation showed that the bees had crammed
every available cell with honey and had built fresh scraps of comb in
any corner where there was room.
On their return Alice met them with a joyful face.
“What do you think?” she cried. “I’ve been sorting over the cases of
sections you brought back, and there are a lot that haven’t been
touched by the bees at all—perhaps three or four hundred; and there
are quite a lot more that have only little torn places; so they can go
as ‘No. 1’ anyway. Then there are all the sections that weren’t stolen
at all. We’ll still have some honey to sell.”
“Maybe a hundred dollars’ worth,” returned Carl. “That won’t go far
toward our big payment next week.”
“Yes, it will—with our extracted honey,” urged Bob. “We must get it
all off, extract every drop we have, and sell it quick—sacrifice it if
necessary. Anything to get returns at once!”
“There must be four hundred dollars’ worth on the hives. We can make
the payment, if we’re quick,” said Alice.
“Anyway, we won’t have a cent left over,” insisted Carl, who seemed
determined to look on the black side.
“But we have the bees. Next year they’ll make our fortunes,” said
Alice, cheerfully.
Tired as he was, Bob paddled down to Morton that afternoon, wrote a
letter of explanation to Brown & Son, and ordered by telegraph nine
hundred five-pound honey pails, to be shipped by return freight. The
pails cost forty dollars, and he groaned inwardly as he parted with
the money.
It was with some uneasiness that he navigated his boat past the
squatter’s clearing, but he saw nothing of any of the Larue family,
either coming or going. When he got back to the bee-yard he found that
Alice and Carl had been busy. They had brought in the old honey
extractor, cleaned and oiled it and set it up, along with the
honey-tanks. Carl had improvised an uncapping-box from the rain-water
barrel, and they had already extracted the honey from a great number
of the damaged and unfinished sections of comb.
The three of them finished up that part of the work during the
afternoon and cleaned out all the honey from the unsaleable sections
and from those that the bees had torn in Larue’s barn. From these they
got more than a thousand pounds of fine, clear honey. It was an
excellent beginning.
But it was only a beginning. In five days they would have to pay Mr.
Farr five hundred dollars with interest. To sell the honey might well
take two days. Consequently they had something more than two days in
which to take off, extract, and pack a crop of perhaps four thousand
pounds of honey. It would have been a fairly large undertaking for
skilled men, and the Harmans were quite unaccustomed to extracting on
a large scale.
But they had determination enough to make up for lack of experience.
They went to bed early, in order to have as long a rest as possible.
By daylight Alice was preparing breakfast, and the sun was not more
than fairly above the trees when they attacked the big job.
Armed with veils, gloves, smokers, and bee-brushes, the boys went out
to the yard, while Alice waited for the honey to come in. The big
extracting supers were full of bees, that rushed up furiously when the
cover was lifted off. Carl drove them down with smoke, while Bob
quickly lifted out comb after comb, shook and brushed off the bees in
masses before the hive, and put the combs into an empty super. When
that was full, he carried it with some difficulty into the house.
While he was gone Carl removed the now vacant super, closed the hive,
and smoked another. Bob came back in a moment and cleared the bees
from this super, carrying it likewise into the cabin. Super after
super came off, and when seven or eight of them were stacked in the
honey-room they began extracting operations.
Alice had volunteered to do the uncapping, as she had been accustomed
to do it at home, and she had the huge, razor-edged honey-knife
already standing in a pail of hot water, since the edge cuts much
better when warm enough to melt the wax.
She rested one of the full honeycombs on the rim of the barrel, and
with a single sweep of the great knife she sliced off the entire outer
sealed surface of the comb, so as to leave the cells open. Repeating
this operation upon the other side, she handed the comb to Carl, who
slipped it into the extractor. When four combs had been uncapped and
put into the machine, he turned the crank vigorously. The reel whirred
as the combs spun round; impelled by centrifugal force, the honey flew
out of the cells against the sides of the extractor and dribbled
slowly down to the bottom.
When he stopped the machine to take out the now empty combs Carl put
his finger down into the extractor and scraped up a dripping fingerful
of honey, which he put into his mouth.
“Delicious!” he exclaimed, with high appreciation.
Meanwhile Alice had uncapped a fresh set of four combs, and a pool of
honey was forming in the bottom of the extractor. It was so thick that
it ran very slowly down the sides, but within a few minutes it stood
several inches deep. Bob drew off a pailful through the gate, and
poured it through the cheese-cloth strainer into one of the tanks. It
was almost water-clear, thick and rich—honey of the very highest
grade.
Bob then returned to the hives and began to bring in supers
single-handed, taking back the sets of emptied combs and replacing
them on the hives. He was able to attend to this duty as fast as Alice
and Carl could uncap and extract. At noon, when Alice stopped work to
prepare dinner, they had extracted almost six hundred pounds of honey.
It was the harvest from fourteen hives.
“Why, that isn’t half bad,” said Alice, after making this calculation.
“That amounts to about forty-five pounds per hive. Better than I
expected from this poor season.”
“We may have more honey than we think,” said Carl, brightening. “But
we must get ahead faster, or it’ll take us all the week.”
During the afternoon they managed to empty the supers of twenty-one
colonies. But these were not quite so well filled, and yielded only a
little more than seven hundred pounds.
That night it rained—the longed-for rain, now too late to be of
service. Early the next morning they set to work again, but had to
stop taking off honey on account of a fresh downpour. In the midst of
the rain the wagon arrived from Morton with the nine hundred
honey-pails.
“Couldn’t we send some of it back with him?” suggested Alice.
So they begged the teamster to wait a few hours, and set to work
furiously, filling the tins from the tanks. Bob sat by the tank with a
mountain of five-pound pails beside him, filling them rapidly from the
open honey-gate. Once full, he passed them to Alice, who wiped them
clean and put on the covers; then Carl nailed them up again in their
shipping crates.
At noon they ate a hasty, cold luncheon, and again set feverishly to
work at the pails. They made such speed that at four o’clock they were
able to start the wagon back with a load of two hundred five-pound
pails of honey.
The rain had stopped, and they began to take off honey and extract
again. They were getting rather tired, and the task before them seemed
endless. It was the twenty-ninth of the month. It seemed hardly
possible that they could put up all that honey and turn it into cash
in less than three days.
All that afternoon they toiled, weary and silent, but still
determined. The uncapping barrel was nearly full of oozy masses of
comb, from which the honey drained slowly into a pail through a hole
in the bottom. The three Harmans were smeared to the eyes with honey.
They were stiff with stings, too, for the whole room was crawling with
bees that had been brought in on the combs. They were underfoot, on
the walls, in the cappings and the strainer, and a great mass had
clustered on the window like a swarm.
By six o’clock there were scarcely half a dozen hives left uncleared
in the apiary, though a large pile of unhandled supers had accumulated
in the workroom. They stopped work, and the boys helped Alice to get
supper.
“But we’re not going to get through in time,” said Bob, anxiously.
“It’ll take us nearly all of to-morrow to extract and can up the rest
of the honey. Then it’ll take some time to get it sold.”
“But we’ve _got_ to get through in time!” cried Alice. “Are we going
to fail now by just a few hours?”
“Well, let’s finish the extracting to-night—work till it’s done,” Bob
proposed.
“All right,” replied Carl, wearily. “I’m game!”
So after supper they attacked their task afresh. The boys tried to get
all the supers into the house while daylight lasted. They worked hard,
but the last supers were very heavy, the bees were cross as night came
on, and darkness had fallen before they got the last one in. Alice
placed several beeswax candles about the room, and they began to
extract.
Hour after hour the whir and rattle of the extractor went on. It was
almost the only sound in the room, for they were too tired to talk.
The pile of full supers went down, and the empty ones went up, till
they clogged the room, and had to be carried outdoors. Alice uncapped
till she could no longer hold the slippery knife-handle, and Carl took
her place, while she drew off honey from the extractor into the tanks.
It was hot in the choked little room, reeking with the odor of honey
and the smell of the candles and the tankful of wet cappings, and
occasionally they went outdoors for a few minutes to cool off and
breathe a little.
“Alice said that bee-keeping was kid-glove work—nothing heavy or hard
about it,” remarked Carl ironically during one of these rests.
It seemed to be tacitly understood that they were to keep at it till
the honey was all extracted, and they stayed doggedly at work despite
weariness and stings. It was shortly after one o’clock when they
emptied the last super; they were all saturated with honey and
perspiration; the uncapping tank was heaped with wax, and the candles
had burned low. All the tanks were brimful, and there was over a
hundred pounds in the reservoir of the extractor.
“Going to can it up?” asked Carl, faintly.
“Not much!” Bob ejaculated. “I’m going to bed.”
They were all ready to go. Alice retired to her room, and the boys
spread blankets on the floor of the living-room. They were tired
enough to doze the moment their heads touched the pillow, but Bob had
not been in bed for five minutes when he bounced up with a yell. A bee
had stung him on the leg.
The floor and the blankets were alive with bees. Bees seemed to be
everywhere. The boys shook out their bedding, swept up the floor, and
tried again. There were fewer bees now, but still enough to make their
presence felt, and finally the boys became nervous and wakeful,
imagining that they felt crawling bees even where there were none.
After a restless half-hour Bob got up and lighted a candle.
“I can’t sleep. I’m going to can up honey,” he announced.
Carl wearily followed him, and after they had been at work a few
minutes Alice came out and joined them. There had not been so many
bees in her room, but more than enough to make sleeping impossible.
Hour after hour they drew off honey from the big tanks into the little
pails, and packed them in the crates. They worked till after three
o’clock, stopped for hot coffee and bread, and completed their great
task soon after sunrise. There were altogether 675 five-pound tins,
beside the two hundred already sent to Morton—a total crop of 4375
pounds. At least fifty pounds more would still drain from the
uncapping tank.
But they were too dead weary to rejoice. They ate a hastily prepared
breakfast, then carried the blankets to a sunny spot outdoors and went
sound asleep. Not one of them woke till nearly noon, when they were
aroused by the hallooing of the teamster, who had been ordered to come
back that day for another load.
It made a big load, and the man was unwilling to take it. But they
could not think of another day’s wait, and finally persuaded him with
arguments and increased pay. Bob was to go out with the load, they had
agreed. He was to ship the honey and go to Toronto with it. There he
was to make the quickest possible sale and send the money back by
telegraph.
“You’d better come over to Morton on the first of August, day after
to-morrow,” he said to Carl, as he was leaving. “Probably you’ll find
the money waiting for you at the telegraph office. If it isn’t there,
wait at the hotel, and I’ll telephone you some time during the day. In
case there’s any delay, get old Farr to let us have a few days’ grace.
He ought to do that, especially if we pay him for the accommodation.”
Bob went off on the loaded wagon. Carl and Alice were too thoroughly
tired to feel inclined to clear up the sticky litter in the
extracting-room and they spent most of the day in sleep.
Next morning, however, they put things in order. The tank of wet
cappings was left to drain still longer, but Alice washed down the
floor, removed the extracting outfit, and restored the boys’ bed. All
the live bees in the room were by this time clustered in a quiet lump
on the window, and Carl was able to brush them off gently into a
bucket and carry them out to a hive like a natural swarm. He put most
of the wet supers back on the hives whence they had been taken, and
was surprised to notice that the bees paid no attention to these
fresh, sticky combs when they were exposed in the yard. A little honey
seemed to be coming in. He could not guess its source, but it was
enough to keep the bees from robbing.
All this did not take them more than a couple of hours, and Alice had
even time to wash, dry, and iron a blouse before starting for the
village which represented civilization for them just then. Carl also
paid civilization the homage of brushing his shoes and putting on a
tie under his low collar, and then they made an early start down the
river.
They rather disliked to leave the cabin unguarded, but this time it
contained little of value. As they passed Indian Slough they spied
Larue on the shore; he looked long and steadily after them, but
neither made any sign.
“Don’t like it!” remarked Carl. “He knows we’ve gone away now, and
goodness knows what he may do to the bees!”
“I don’t think he’ll touch them. He must have had enough of fighting
bees,” returned Alice.
Anyhow, it was a chance that had to be taken, for they could not stand
on guard by the apiary forever. They reached Morton about ten o’clock
and went straight to the telegraph office, where they were bitterly
disappointed to find no waiting message from Bob.
A feeling of impending misfortune crept over both of them. They had
fully expected the money to be there.
“I do hope Bob doesn’t try one of his wild bluffs for a high price and
miss a sale altogether!” Carl muttered.
Alice went to the hotel, to be on the lookout for a telephone call,
while Carl hung about the telegraph office. At every clicking of the
keys he thrilled with anticipation, but noon arrived, and one o’clock,
and still no word from Toronto. Carl then hunted up Mr. Farr and
explained the situation.
“I don’t know why Bob hasn’t wired,” he said, “but we’ve got the honey
and it’s as safe as money in the bank. It’s only a matter of a few
hours, or days, at the most. If you’ll give us a little extension of
time we’ll gladly pay you for it. Anything you wish, five dollars, or
ten dollars a day, even.”
But the postmaster shook his head with a grim smile.
“I’ll give you all the time the law allows, and not an hour longer!”
he said.
“Yes, but can’t you—”
“No, I can’t. I told you out and out at the start that you’d get no
kindness from me—straight business and nothing further.”
He refused to hear a word of Carl’s protestations, and at last the boy
went to the hotel, indignant and keenly anxious. Alice had had no
message. They waited, staying near the telephone, unable to read,
unable to talk, till, about four o’clock, a call came for Carl.
Almost breathless, he took the receiver, and recognized Bob’s
long-distance voice.
“Is that you, Bob?” he cried. “What have you done? Farr won’t give us
an hour’s time.”
“Never mind!” came his brother’s reassuring voice. “It’s all right. I
sold at ten and a half. I’ve got the money and I’ll wire it at once.”
Ten and a half! They had not expected to get over ten cents for the
extracted honey. Carl almost shouted, and Alice gasped with relief
when he told her. It seemed as if a mountain’s weight had been lifted
off their shoulders.
But there must have been some delay about sending the money, for it
had not arrived by six o’clock. Carl hung about the telegraph office
all the evening, growing uneasy once more as hour by hour went by.
Surely something had not gone wrong at the last minute!
But the money-bearing message did finally arrive towards ten o’clock.
It was an order for $612, which included the returns from what was
left of their comb-honey crop. The telegraph clerk wrote a check, and
Carl and his sister hastened to Farr’s house. It was dark from top to
bottom. Carl knocked loudly once, twice. There was no reply.