They were disappointed, too, in the effect of the rain. High winds succeeded it; the clover bloomed afresh, but there was no honey in the blossoms, dried up by the breeze. Every morning the Harmans watched the skies with almost agonizing interest. The slightest change in the weather might be worth thousands. Another day of violent rain came, and then once more the fickle clover began to yield.
It yielded slowly and spasmodically at first, a heavy day and then a light one. Then it ceased altogether, and with sinking hearts they began to believe that the season was a failure after all. Then the temperature rose; hot, muggy days came, with heavy dews, and the roar and rush in the bee-yard began again.
Within four days they had to take out all the combs that had not before been handled, and extract them. Scarcely had they packed this honey when the formerly emptied ones were found full again. They were sealed within a few days more, and for day after day the extractor was hardly ever idle. Alice uncapped honey till her hands blistered. The uncapping-box had been filled many times with wax, and when they canned up the last lot of honey they found it more than twice as much as the former shipment. There were 185 sixty-pound tins which went to the city, and this time the market had improved slightly and they got seventeen cents a pound.
“Nineteen hundred dollars,” Carl calculated. “Well, it’s not a great crop, but we’ve more than covered expenses. And we still have the bees.”
“Surely it isn’t all over?” exclaimed Joe.
“Just about,” said Bob, who had been studying the clover and the weather-signs. “All we’ll get now will be a few pickings.”
All things must, in fact, come to an end, and the clover-heads were turning brown. Few fresh ones were developing, and there seemed to be no honey in those few. The bees worked energetically still, but the supers did not show much result from it; and by degrees they slackened in their efforts and hung outside their hives in great, brown, murmuring masses.
“Might as well take the supers off and call it finished,” said Alice, rather sadly. They had really no reason to complain, but with a first-class season they might easily have taken off twice as much.
A rainy period set in, however, before they could take off the supers, and for a week both the bees and the apiarists were scarcely ever able to go out undrenched. It rained every day, a soaking, steady rain that produced a wonderful hay-crop that year and made the wheat tall and heavy-headed. Then it cleared. Going out to investigate the nearest clover-field Carl came back reporting a fresh crop of bloom about to open.
“I do believe it’s going to begin all over again!” he exclaimed.