“Well, we’re not making the $1,800 we hoped for,” said Bob. “But we ought to get $700 for this extracted honey, and about $200 for the sections. Counting what we sold before, that comes to over $1,500.”
“Besides, we won’t need to feed an ounce of sugar for winter,” Alice added. “The hives are so heavy now that they feel as if they were nailed down. How we’ll lift them into the winter cases I don’t know.”
“Yes, and they’ve mostly got young queens,” said Carl. “With plenty of food and young queens they’re sure to winter well and make money for us next year. We’ve got over two hundred and ten colonies now. Next year we’ll almost certainly clear a couple of thousand dollars.”
But they did not get so much for this crop of honey as they expected. The fireweed honey was not quite equal in quality to that from the raspberry. They received only nine cents for the extracted honey, and $2.25 a dozen for the sections. That brought them $810, however; beside they got $40 for a hundred pounds of beeswax from the melted-up cappings and bits of comb. The boys voted that $40 to Alice as her fee for doing the uncapping.
There was not much left to be done now, but prepare the bees for winter, but that meant making new winter cases for nearly all the hives at the lakeside apiary. They had already had a load of lumber and a keg of nails taken there, and were waiting till they should have leisure to do the carpenter work.
A few days after shipping the last of the honey, the two boys went over to the lake with their axes, intending to clear the place up as well as possible. When they came within half a mile of the yard they heard the distant, resonant bay of a hound somewhere to the west.
“Some one’s breaking the game laws,” remarked Bob, for the open season for deer was still far off. “Probably it’s one of those fellows from Morton.”
The voice of the hound was coming nearer, and by the time they approached the lake, it sounded so close that they stopped in the underbrush to watch for signs of the hunt.
In a few minutes a crash sounded in the woods, and a small buck dashed out and plunged into the shallow water. Instantly a rifle cracked from somewhere down the shore. The deer wheeled, turned straight toward the boys, and had come close before it caught sight of them. It swerved again in a panic and went across the bee-yard, clearing the hives in great bounds.
