“For it isn’t as you have it in the South,” she explained to Joe, “where there’s honey coming in all the time. It all comes from clover here, and it only lasts about a month. Everything has to be absolutely ready for it, and then it’s a wild rush and scramble, and then it’s all over.”
It sounded to Joe like an exciting speculation. The bees were certainly building up fast; the hives were full of young bees and brood, and the young queens were laying at a great rate. The bloom of dandelions and fruit-trees kept this stimulation up, but at last these came to an end, and there was a blank. There would be nothing more till the pink clover opened.
It was an anxious period. Many of the colonies were dangerously short of honey. They had brought little from the South, and with the heavy brood-rearing they had used up the dandelion-honey as fast as gathered. There was no help but to feed sugar. Bob brought in a small wagon-load of hundred-pound sacks from the grocer, and a hundred pounds did not go far. And this further expense was an alarming item. Bob suggested selling fifty colonies.
“Bees are high now,” he said. “We could get six or eight hundred dollars for fifty. It might be safer.”
“Don’t do it,” said Joe. “There isn’t any money that could buy these bees, after all we’ve gone through to get them. No, we’ll go the whole hog—make or break!”
The bees were still building up, though more slowly now. On the twelfth of June Alice discovered the first clover-head open. Within the next day or two a perceptible pink began to show in the meadows, and then it turned suddenly chilly, with a cold rain.
The clover ceased to open and the bees to fly. For a whole week this lasted—a series of heavy, cold rains and chilly nights. To Joe it seemed a sort of nightmare; he grew disposed to think that real summer was unknown in Canada; but the world grew marvelously green under the drench, and the clover grew tall and rank.
“It’s holding the bees back,” said Alice, “but it’ll be all the better if it only does turn dry now. Only we can’t wait too long.”
The rain ceased at last. The sky cleared; a cold north wind blew. It was worse than the wet weather. Then, with the sudden shift of the Northern spring, the wind swung round to the southwest. A shower fell that night, but a warm one. It was warm and damp the next morning. The earth steamed.
“Honey weather at last!” Bob cried. “Now if it only holds!”