A RUN OF LUCK
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.