The weather had turned hot and moist—ideal weather for honey secretion—and the bees were working furiously. Apparently the shock of the transferring had stimulated them to double energy. Looking into the hives, the boys found nearly all the new frames were built full of comb already and being rapidly filled with honey or brood. The “pizen bees” were growing more accustomed to being handled also, and were less irritable than at first; but they were black and inferior stock at the best, and Alice was impatient to begin to introduce Italian blood.
The steamboat passed the next day, and Joe signaled it. He took out the beeswax, packed it in a box for shipment North, and himself embarked for Magnolia Landing. Late the next afternoon he came back in Uncle Louis’s rowboat, bringing a sack of meal, a ham, and a quantity of sugar and coffee; and while at the plantation he had mailed an order to a queen-breeder near Mobile to send a dozen Italian queens in care of the boat clerk. He also instructed the clerk to try to get a dozen empty glucose barrels from one of the Selma candy-factories, for it was plain that they were going to have honey to extract presently.
Candler had made no sign during his absence, and the bees had been working heavily. The blackberry was coming into blossom now, and the gallberry would follow. There would be an unbroken flow of honey from one source or another for two months, and they began at once to prepare supers, or top stories, for all the strongest colonies, to give them more room for storage.
By way of keeping Sam busy, they set him to finding and chopping down bee-trees—a task which suited him exactly. He cut six trees that day, and Bob was able to transfer the bees and part of the comb in four of them. The others were too badly smashed by the fall to be of any value; and on the whole they hardly considered bee-tree cutting a success.
“We’ve got enough,” Alice pronounced. “If we get any more bees, we’ll have to order more frames and foundation, and we can’t afford that.”
The next day was the end of the week, and they looked out with some anxiety for the return of Candler and his mysterious partners; but no one appeared that day or the next. Late in the evening the boat came down from Selma, bringing the empty barrels, which the boys paid for and landed, ranging them in a row back of the cabin. It looked like a formidable measure for the bees to fill, Joe thought.
“Not a bit of it,” said Alice. “I expect we could get a couple of barrels right now, even before the supers are on. Only it isn’t ripened yet. We’ll have to extract before you know it, and we must have things ready in time. I wish some of you would go over the cabin and make it really bee-tight. We’ll have to do the extracting there and the floor is full of cracks.”
Bob undertook this task, finding plenty of small holes in the wall that had been overlooked before. The floor was, as Alice said, in poor condition. Many of the boards were cracked and rotted, and he undertook to drive them tightly together and nail them down.
“Why, these boards aren’t even nailed!” he remarked; and a moment later he uttered a loud cry of astonishment. “Seems to be a cellar under this house!”
“A cellar!” exclaimed his sister, who was looking on. “I always thought the floor sounded hollow there. Maybe there’s an ancient treasure in it.”