Carl and Joe worked at one gum while Bob and Alice treated another, and Sam, muffled in a heavy gauze veil, stood ready to fetch and carry. This made progress rapid. By the latter part of the afternoon forty of the old gums had been transferred to the modern hives, and the whole place was so overrun with irritated and confused bees that they decided to stop work for the day.
The intention had been to put all these full honeycombs through the extractor; in fact, they had counted rather heavily upon the thousand pounds or so of honey that they were going to get from the gums. But by degrees it began to be clear that this was an illusion. The gums had less honey than they had expected, and it had to be cut out in broken bits and irregular lumps that the extractor could not handle. The honey was dark and dirty besides, full of crushed brood and sand and pollen.
“Not worth bothering with,” said Carl in disgust. “What’ll we do with it? Unless we get it out of the combs it’ll make a mess when we try to melt up the wax.”
“Can’t we-all eat it?” Sam suggested. He had been surreptitiously slipping lumps of comb under his veil all the afternoon.
“Don’t worry, Sam. You’ll get all you can eat,” said Alice. “We’ll spread the rest of the combs over the ground and let the bees rob it out. They’ll carry it back to the new hives, and we’ll get it just the same.”
As long as the light lasted they worked at preparing new hives and frames for the next day. Even after that, Bob undertook to continue nailing frames by the light of fat-pine torches, but the flare drew such intolerable numbers of all kinds of nocturnal gnats, flies, and moths, to say nothing of bees, that he had to give it up.
Honey seemed to be coming in freely the next morning. The new hives had recovered from their confusion and were settling down to work, making the best of what must have seemed to them a terrible catastrophe. The honey flow was so good, in fact, that the bees refused to touch the exposed pile of combs. When honey is to be had in the flowers, bees will refuse to take it in any other way; and Alice’s plan of having the old combs “robbed out” had to be postponed till the harvest was less good.
That day they transferred all the rest of Old Dick’s gums, and Alice looked with immense pride at the trim, modern apiary that had replaced the wreck. Another day cleaned up about thirty of the colonies scattered about in stumps and hollow logs. The honey flow continued strong. The dewberry was in bloom now, and the slopes were all white with the little flowering vines. From morning to night there was a steady roar from the bee-yard, and, looking into some of the first transferred hives, Alice found that the bees had built out all their foundation into comb. Already the queen had deposited eggs in some of it, while the bees were putting honey in the rest—thin, colorless nectar just gathered from the dewberry-blossoms.
“At this rate they’re going to need top stories in a week,” said Alice. “We’ll have to get a lot of supers ready. Maybe we’ll have to send for more supplies.”
“Knock on wood,” Carl advised. “Everything’s gone too smooth so far.”