The boys had no idea of clearing up the whole berry-patch. They wished merely to get a view of the interior, and, once inside the thicket, they found progress a little easier. From a slightly elevated spot they were able to get a partial view. At least twenty gums were in sight. Some of them were made of sections of hollow log placed on end and covered with a board; others were tall plank boxes, which seemed to have rested upon board platforms at one time. Through the thickets they could dimly distinguish others, some standing upright still, many of them fallen on the ground, or leaning against one another. Not all had bees in them. Carl cautiously raised the nearest, peeped in, and turned it upside down. It was empty and weather-bleached inside and out. The bees had died and the wax-moth had destroyed every trace of the comb. But in spite of all losses it was plain that a great number of Old Dick’s bees still survived.
“Can you make any guess of how many there are?” asked Bob, confusedly.
Nothing but the roughest guess was possible. They penetrated further into the berry-thicket, cutting away the canes, stumbling over logs, continually assailed by the irritated insects. But for the strong veils and oiled gloves they could hardly have held their ground, for the bees were unaccustomed to man and were nearly as wild and vicious as hornets. The further the boys went the more it became certain that the old negro’s apiary must really have been extensive at one time. Perhaps there had been more than two hundred gums. A space of fifty yards square seemed to be covered with bee-boxes of all possible shapes and sizes, and now in every stage of decay. Some of them had fallen and become almost buried in weeds and rubbish, but the bees had stuck to their home, filling up the rotted holes with great lumps and slabs of wax and bee-glue. Some of the plank gums seemed to be held together almost entirely by the plastered propolis of the bees’ repair work; there were flyholes at every point, and the Harmans regarded these edifices with admiration. They had never seen anything like it, and in the North bees could, of course, never survive a winter in such a hive. It was hard to make any sort of estimate as to the present contents of the apiary, but the boys thought that at least fifty of the old gums still had bees in them.
“At the rate of six pounds of bees to the gum,” said Carl, “there must be three hundred pounds of live bees here which we can have for nothing. The dealers would charge us four hundred dollars or so for them. Then there must be a lot of honey in these old gums—several hundred pounds, probably, and certainly there’s a lot of beeswax. We can clear the whole place up, ship the bees North in wire cages in May, and the honey and wax ought to pay the expenses.”
“So it should,” Bob agreed. “And just think what all these bees would do on the clover in Ontario next June! They ought to be worth a couple of thousand dollars, if it was a good season.”
“We’d have to camp here for a month or so. It would be quite like our first days in the backwoods apiary in Haliburton.”
“I suppose we could fix up Old Dick’s cabin so we could live in it. Let’s look it over. We barely glanced into it the other day,” said Bob.
The framework of the old shanty was still fairly sound, being made of enduring cypress. But many of the boards hung loose from their rusted nails, and the pine floor of the little veranda was dangerous to step on. The roof, of home-made split shingles, was in a bad way. The door hung by one hinge, and the single window was little more than a shapeless hole. A honeysuckle vine clustered densely over the decaying pine posts of the veranda and was thrusting its tendrils through the window.
There was but one room. A great deal of one end of it was occupied by the big, roughly built stone fireplace. There was the broken wreck of a bench in a corner, but nothing else by way of furniture, excepting a sort of cupboard fastened to the wall, closed with a buttoned door. Bob directed Carl’s attention to the bees and honeycomb exposed on the ceiling. The insects were active that morning, crawling briskly over their combs, coming and going through a crack in the boards, and none of them offered to attack the boys, who watched them with interest. Indeed, bees will seldom sting when in a room or under cover.
“Pity we couldn’t leave this just as it is! It’s as good as an observatory hive,” Carl remarked with his face a yard away from the mass of bees and honey. “But the first time we had a light in here the bees would all fly into it. We’ll have to cut all these combs off, and—”