Alice was no novice at queen-rearing, the most delicate and difficult branch of apiculture, for she had reared nearly all the Italian queens for their old apiary in the North. Within a week operations were in full blast. Batch after batch of queen-cells, a dozen at a time, were secured by depriving a strong colony of its queen, producing in them an immediate desire to raise a fresh one. Each of these cells she “grafted” with a tiny larva hatched from one of the new Italian eggs, and the prepared cells were then given to another colony to feed and finish. In this manner, with luck, it would not take long to raise enough queens to Italianize the whole outfit.
During this time they neither saw nor heard anything of the river-men, and they made an attempt to go on with their work without thinking of danger. It was not so easy, for there was a perpetual strain of nervousness. The boys kept the rifles and shotgun always loaded and handy, and Alice took to carrying her pistol strapped to her waist when she left the cabin. As a further precaution they placed half a dozen of the most vicious-tempered colonies of bees directly in front of the door, and with the cabin thus enveloped all day in a flying cloud of irritable bees, they felt fairly safe from attack.
The river pirates were still on the island, however, for several times the report of a gun reverberated over from the distant swamps. Venturing to reconnoiter in the boat, Joe and Sam even sighted their camping-place, on a dry bank nearly a mile up the bayou. No one was in sight about the rough shelter of bark and palmetto, nor about the almost dead fire, and the boys did not make a close investigation but dropped silently down to their own territory.
Meanwhile the honey flow from the dewberry was over, and the blackberry flow was waning fast. The Harmans were disappointed in the result. Compared with their Northern experiences, the supers had filled up slowly. The Italian strain had not yet had time to tell, and the “swamp bees” were inferior workers.
“We’re not going to get half the crop we expected,” said Bob, disgustedly. “Instead of ten barrels, we’ll be lucky to get three.”
“But there’s the tupelo and black-gum bloom to come yet,” Alice said.
“But we daren’t wait for them,” Bob reminded her. “It’s the last of April. The bees have got to be in Canada in a month at most, and we’ve got to split them up and ship them, besides extracting this honey—and—and more things than I can think of.”
“Something’ll happen to bring it all right,” said Alice, optimistically. “It always does.”
But, so far as the blackberry-honey was concerned, there was no use in delaying the extracting any longer. They would have to take what they could get, as Carl said; and fortunately the dewberry and blackberry-honey was normally so light-colored that they counted on getting a better price for it than for the later and darker honeys.
The boys made a stand for the extractor from a couple of bee-hives, bolted and nailed it solidly, brought in two of the empty barrels, and knocked the head out of one of them for an uncapping-tank. They went over the cabin carefully, and closed all possible cracks where robber bees might get in, and late in the afternoon Carl brought in the combs from two supers so that they could begin work at once in the morning.