Alice hastened out to look. The air was full of flashing wings and a resonant hum. The main honey-flow had started. The crisis of their fortunes was at hand.
CHAPTER IV
HONEY AND SWARMS
The sullen listlessness that had hung over the apiary for over a week was gone. Bees were at work from every hive, coming and going with a swift activity like the days of the willow bloom.
“Hurrah! We must put on the supers at once,” cried Alice. “I believe we ought to have had them on several days ago.”
Breakfast was hurried through that morning, and no dishes were washed up after it. They hurried down to the barn to bring up the prepared supers, placing one beside each hive, so that they could all be put on at once.
The supers for extracted honey were exactly the same size as the body of the hive itself, without either top or bottom, and each containing eight ready-built frames of comb. The cover of the hive is removed and the super set upon it, then the cover replaced on the top of the two-story edifice. Usually a sheet of zinc queen-excluder is placed between the two, the perforations so accurately made that they will let the workers pass into the upper story, while the larger-bodied queen cannot get through. The lower story is then known as the brood-chamber, and the ideal condition is for the queen to keep this division constantly full of the cycle of eggs, larvæ, and hatching bees, while the workers store all the honey in the super, convenient for taking off.
A good deal of comb honey in one-pound sections was to be produced also, and Alice had already picked out the strongest colonies for this work. Section honey is a fancy product and sells at a high price, and the apiarists counted on this to pay off the $500 due in August. For that reason, the comb-honey crop was of the most immediate importance, though there would be a greater quantity of the extracted honey. Naturally, bees will store much more honey when built combs are furnished them, but the extracted honey sells more slowly, and at little more than half the price.
They had already prepared more than a hundred section supers,—boxes of the same length and width as the brood-chamber, but only half the depth,—each containing thirty-two sections with foundation. One of these was set accurately on the top of each of the seventy colonies selected to gather the fancy crop. The deep, extracting supers of built combs were distributed among the rest of the bees.
Carl and Alice worked hard all that day and for part of the next forenoon, putting on the supers. The weather was hot and moist, splendid honey weather. More and more of the pale raspberry blossoms were opening, though as yet the honey-flow was barely at its start.
That evening Alice peeped into some of the newly placed supers, irresistibly curious to know what the bees had done. The supers of combs were full of the insects, cleaning out the cells and varnishing them ready for honey-storage, and here and there was even a glistening patch of fresh honey. In the supers of sections no combs were yet built of course; but the bees were clustering there in masses, and evidently preparing for work in earnest.