“Well, we’re going to ship what we can,” said Bob.
“No, I mean to ship bees, hives, combs, and all. Ship the colonies as they stand. Send a car-load of hives of bees by freight.”
They all looked at her in astonishment.
“A freight-car holds three or four hundred hives,” remarked Bob, who had made a study of the different methods of shipping bees before he came South. “And the car would cost us four hundred dollars. We haven’t bees enough to make it pay—and we haven’t the money if we had.”
“Well, I’ve thought all that out,” Alice argued. “As soon as the honey flow is over we could ship our bees on the steamboat up to the nearest railway point—Selma, isn’t it? There we could split up each of our hives into three, and in about three weeks they’d be built up strong enough again to ship. Then they’d have a few weeks more in Canada to breed up before the clover came in bloom, and by that time they’d all be roaring big colonies. Just think what three hundred of them would do on the Ontario clover in a good season! Why, they’d make three thousand dollars’ worth of honey at least. What if it does cost four hundred dollars to ship them?”
The boys contemplated this dazzling prospect for a moment in silence.
“I always said you were a genius and that you’d either make us rich or break us,” Carl remarked. “But this looks like a pretty wild gamble.”
“So it did when we bought the bees in the North,” his sister retorted. “But wasn’t I right?”
“But think,” Bob interposed. “It sounds good, but we’d have to buy the queens for making up nearly two hundred fresh colonies. No time to rear ’em ourselves then. And then in Canada we’d have to have equipment for all these bees—supers for three hundred colonies, excluders, a world of stuff. A thousand dollars wouldn’t see us through it. We simply haven’t got the capital to risk—for we’ve got to live ourselves, you know, while we wait for the honey crop.”
“None of you have got any nerve!” Alice flashed, almost ready to cry with disappointment; but Joe broke in with what he had been meditating.