They began immediately after an early breakfast. Joe had never seen honey extracted before, and he volunteered to stay in the building and turn the extractor, while Bob and Carl, veiled and gloved, went between the cabin and the bee-yard, bringing in full combs and carrying out emptied ones. Sam stood ready for odd jobs, heavily armored against stings, and divided between excitement at actually seeing honey by the barrelful and alarm at facing a hundred colonies of robbed bees.
Alice, as usual, had volunteered to do the uncapping. She took up one of the great, full combs of honey, sealed white and smooth as a board, and rested it on the edge of the uncapping-barrel. With the heavy, razor-edged honey-knife she sliced off the sealed surface, first on one side and then on the other, and handed the opened comb to Joe to put into the extractor. When four combs were uncapped he began to turn the machine, and the whirling reel slung the honey out in streams against the side of the tin. Carl had come in with more combs, and he lingered to see the result, finally drawing off a cupful from the gate at the base of the extractor.
“I thought blackberry-honey was water-clear!” he complained. “Just look at this!”
It was far from clear, being yellowish-brown, rather thin and not possessing any great aroma or flavor.
“Not much like clover-honey,” Alice admitted, after sampling it. “Just a dead sweet. There must be titi and willow and all sorts of things in it besides blackberry. I suppose there are too many sorts of blooms at once in these swamps to get any honey pure. Oh, well, it’ll bring ten cents in these days of high prices, so don’t make fun of it, Carl, but go out and bring some more of it in.”
“Dunno what you-all grumblin’ ’bout,” said Sam, who had now secured the cup. “Dis yere’s de bestest honey I ever tasted.”
He swallowed the remainder of the cupful, and meanwhile Alice was uncapping a fresh set of combs. Little by little the honey accumulated in the bottom of the extractor. Sam at last drew it off by pailfuls and poured it through a cloth strainer into another empty barrel, which would serve as a storage-tank. Slowly the heavy, dark, sweet stuff crept up in this barrel, and it was full, with nearly a hundred pounds left in the extractor, when they heard the whistle of the river steamer down the stream.
Bob took off his veil and went out hurriedly in the row-boat to instruct the boat to call on the way back to pick up the shipment of honey. He had to wait nearly an hour off the bayou mouth before the steamer came up, and meanwhile the others stopped work. Now that they were fairly started, another full day seemed likely to see the extracting finished.
Alice had to camp out of doors that night, for the cabin was sticky with honey, strewn with scraps of wax and crawling with bees that had been brought in accidentally with the honey. But they started work very early the next morning, skimmed the tank of honey, and set Sam at transferring its contents into one of the shipping-barrels. When this was filled they drove the bung home and rolled the ponderous object with some difficulty outside the cabin.
Extracting went on faster that day, but by night they had only two more barrels filled and prepared for shipment, and there was still a good deal of honey on the hives. In fact, it took another whole day to finish it, and at the end they had five barrels standing in a row outside the cabin. These held considerably more than three thousand pounds, though they had no means of ascertaining the exact weight.