The Woods-Rider

by Frank Lillie Pollock

With a hatchet he knocked the board top off the gum and placed a wooden box over it, made to fit closely. Then he and Alice began to blow smoke into the bottom of the gum and to pound on it with sticks and the hatchet.

The bees within were fairly subdued with fright, and began to leave the combs and crawl upwards to escape the smoke and the drumming. In about five minutes a peep showed that the small box was almost filled with a clustered, frightened mass of bees, too demoralized to fly, and capable of being poured like water. Bob quickly dumped this cluster on the entrance of the new hive, and, after some hesitation, the insects began to crawl into the unfamiliar home, glad of a refuge anywhere.

Alice meanwhile reached down into the gum with a long knife and cut out a large slab of comb containing brood and honey. This she tied into an empty frame and placed it in the hive, so that the bees should find at least some relic of their former home. While she was doing this Bob pointed quickly.

“There’s the queen!”

A slender-bodied insect, twice the length of an ordinary bee, had emerged from the mass and was crawling slowly and with dignity into the hive entrance. A stream of workers was already following her, and in a moment or two all the crowd of bees on the entrance board began to put down their heads and vibrate their wings rapidly, in token of joy at seeing signs of readjustment after the catastrophe that had befallen them. The returning bees in the air also, who had hesitated in wild consternation at seeing their old home gone and this strange edifice in its place, now began to alight and venture in to deposit their honey or pollen.

“They’ll be all right now,” said Bob with satisfaction. “They’ll start building on that foundation, and if the honey-flow keeps up they’ll be a good colony in four weeks.”

What bees were left in the old gum they knocked out without much ceremony, and Bob split the gum in two with the hatchet. Alice selected two or three good smooth sheets of comb containing sealed-over brood, presently to hatch into young bees, and tied them into frames which she added to the ones in the hive. Then Bob carried away the wrecked gum and handed it over to Carl, who cut out the rest of the combs, saving out such as contained honey enough to be worth extracting, and throwing the rest aside for melting into wax.

Elated with their initial success, Bob and Alice attacked a second gum. But this one did not go so smoothly. The bees were reluctant to leave their combs and go into the upper box. It took fifteen minutes of pounding and smoking to get a cluster of any size, and then they refused to stay in the new hive. They ran in and ran out again, took wing, and numbers of them detected their old gum and made desperate efforts to get into it again. Bob had to split the gum to pieces before they could get nearly all the bees out of it, and there, almost by accident, they espied the queen, in a corner of the black, crooked combs, surrounded by a knot of her bees who would not leave her. Alice picked her up and placed her in the new hive, whereupon the commotion quieted down.

The third gum proved very weak in bees and hardly likely to build up into a colony of any value. Then came several good ones, and the pile of cut-out wax and honeycomb grew rapidly.

The carpenters meanwhile were preparing the new hives faster than the apiarists could use them. A great stack of the prepared boxes was ready, and the whole party turned in to help at the transferring.