Of the one hundred and eighty colonies, ten were dead. Fifteen others were without queens and had to be united at once with normal colonies. From more than twenty hives they had found one or more frames of comb missing. It was impossible to say whether these had been omitted by the former owner, or whether they had been abstracted since. About twenty more colonies were very weak in bees, and would hardly breed up to full strength in time to gather much honey from raspberries. But more than a hundred colonies were strong; some of them indeed were almost overflowing the hive already, and would have to be given more room soon if swarming was to be prevented.
But the worst feature was the shortage of honey. Without an abundance of food in the hive, bees will not rear brood in profusion in the spring, which results in a weakened condition for the harvest. A strong colony needs about twenty pounds of honey to carry it through this critical time, and few had as much as that. Some had only a small patch of fresh willow honey; plainly they were living only from day to day, and much of the brood would perish if a spell of cold or rainy weather should come. To put the bees into strong condition they would have to be fed. It would take nearly a thousand pounds of honey to go around, and this new expense would be a hard strain to bear.
It was hard also to face the fact that their profits would have to come from less than one hundred and fifty colonies instead of one hundred and eighty, though they might have known that some were certain to be dead or queenless.
“It wasn’t really a heavy winter loss,” said Alice, “yet with one thing and another, it does look like a poor chance of clearing eighteen hundred dollars.”
“Lucky if we make a thousand,” answered Carl. “If the season should be a poor one, perhaps nothing at all.”
They were all rather tired and despondent. They had rushed into the enterprise full of enthusiasm, and only now did they begin to realize the obstacles ahead of them.
The next day was Sunday. The weather was still fair, and the bees were still busy in the willows and maples. For some reason, in the peaceful May sunshine, the future looked a little brighter to the Harmans. If the good honey-flow from the willows continued, they might not have to feed after all, or, at any rate, not half so much as they had feared.
There was no necessary work to be done that day, and they were glad of the rest. They watched the bees work in the forenoon; they read and lounged lazily in the sun; and in the afternoon they went for a stroll up the river bank.
The stream was lined everywhere with willows and alders, all in flower and roaring with bees. Trout leaped from the water; once they scared up a pair of wild ducks, that went off with a great splashing and flutter. Several times they saw muskrats navigating along close to the shore, the apex of a long V ripple on the water, and once in a rick of drift logs they caught a glimpse of the slender, graceful form of a mink just diving into a hole.
“I’ll bet there’s lots of fur up here,” said Bob. “I tell you, I believe that if I fail in my exams, or if anything goes wrong, I’ll come up here and stay all winter trapping. I could have got six dollars for the pelt of that mink. It might pay better than keeping bees.”