“These hives seem to me awfully light,” said Bob, as he lifted out the box with its bees. “They surely can’t have much honey.”
“I hope we don’t have to feed them,” Alice said, apprehensively. “Never mind; we’ll find out to-morrow. Let’s get them all unpacked to-day.”
Packing and unpacking the hives in fall and spring is the most monotonous and heavy task of the whole season, mere hard, fatiguing work, unrelieved as it is by any interest of skill and science. The young Harmans did not finish the job till nearly dusk, and the boys’ backs and arms ached when they carried the last case away. But the yard looked more like an apiary now, and its owners contemplated it with pride.
The summer hives were sixteen by twenty inches in size, and a little less than a foot deep. They were not painted white, as is usual with bee-hives, but were all sorts of colors, red, green, brown, yellow, giving the apiary a highly cheerful and picturesque effect. Either the former owner had had a lively taste for color, or else he had used whatever paint he happened to have on hand.
That night they kept a fire between the rows of hives, and Bob got up once to replenish it. He heard nothing stir, and in the morning there were no fresh tracks. He predicted that a bear would never again venture so near a dwelling, even with the temptation of unlimited honey.
Both the boys had stiff muscles that morning, but they had planned to inspect the bees thoroughly that day, and determined to go through with it. It promised to be a fine day, and the bees were getting enough honey to make them good-tempered; so they could be handled easily.
“I’m going to show you whether I can’t handle these black bees as painlessly as Italians,” said Alice when they went out, and she stopped before the first hive in the row. She was wearing the usual black-fronted veil, but no gloves, and she pulled her sleeves high up on her wrists.
The colony was a strong one, with scores of bees coming and going. Alice gently blew a little smoke across the entrance, driving in the guards; then she blew a stronger puff. A frightened roar arose within. Panic spread through the hive instantly, for smoke is the only thing that bees fear. Alice waited half a minute and then removed the cover and pulled off the canvas quilt.
A flood of bees surged up between the frames, but she drove them down with a puff of smoke before they could take wing. Another strong puff, and she set down the smoker, and with a screw-driver pried loose the outside frame, next to the hive wall.
It came out hard, for the frames had probably been moved very little for over a year, and the bees had glued them fast. When she lifted it out it was covered with a close layer of black bees, who did not remain quiet on the combs like Italians, but scurried here and there, gathered in clusters, and tumbled off on the ground in knots. They ran over Alice’s bare hands, but were too thoroughly subdued to sting.