“Look here!” he said. “When I was up at the plantation Uncle Louis told me that he’d seen Burnam, and Burnam said that I could get four or five hundred dollars if I needed it bad. I left word for him that I did need it—and now maybe that’ll help us to put Alice’s scheme through!”
“Oh, Joe, that’s splendid of you!” cried the girl, with a grateful glance at her cousin which he considered worth several hundred dollars.
“Not a bit!” Joe responded, flushing and slightly embarrassed. “It’s a business proposition. I want to invest. This apiary game just suits me.”
“Then we can do it!” Alice exclaimed. “Yes, and we’re forgetting our honey crop here. We’ll surely get fifty pounds to the colony. That’ll come to nearly five hundred dollars by the time we want to leave.”
“Yes!” cried Carl, “and we’re forgetting all that wax we shipped away, and what we’ll get from the cappings when we extract. About two hundred pounds. That’ll supply nearly all the foundation we’ll need in the North.”
“We do seem to have overlooked a lot of assets,” said Bob, “especially Joe. I’d hate to urge you, Joe, but if you want to invest in the game, why, we’ll all be delighted. But it’s a risk, you know, and a bad season might run us all into bankruptcy right at the start.”
“I know,” said Joe. “I’ll take the chance. I’ll bet it’s no worse a gamble than turpentining. When’ll I need to get the money?”
“Oh, not for some time,” said Alice. “We’ve to get our honey extracted here, and I must set to work raising Italian queens—just as soon as the breeding queens come that we’ve ordered.”
The council broke up in great enthusiasm for the big enterprise, and they all went back to the bee work with renewed energy. Sam was set to work at cutting every bee-tree that could be found in the neighborhood, for, since the whole outfit was going North, every bee was precious. Meanwhile the boys nailed up all the rest of the frames and made up every remaining scrap of lumber into hives. Carl even proposed taking the boards off the cabin for hive-making.
Luckily the queens arrived the next day, brought up by the clerk of the steamer—a package of a dozen wood-block mailing-cages, each containing an Italian thoroughbred queen with her escort of half a dozen bees who fed her and attended her en route. Alice had several colonies prepared to receive them, and she at once introduced the new-comers to the hives they were in future to occupy. One of them was promptly killed by the bees, who sometimes make difficulties about accepting a strange queen; but the rest survived, and as soon as they had begun to deposit eggs Alice began preparations for rearing more queens from this stock.