All looked most promising, but both she and Carl knew that everything depended on the weather from day to day. For the honey-flow is the most capricious thing in the world. If the weather is too wet, the bees cannot work, and the honey is washed out of the blossoms. If it is too dry, the secretion of nectar in the flowers will cease altogether. A cold spell, too, will check the honey-flow, and high winds will dry it up. Often the clouding over of the sky, or a shift in the wind will produce a heavy flow or stop one. It is regulated by faint differences of temperature and moisture, and the ideal weather is warm and damp, with, if possible, a suggestion of thunderstorm in the air. In such a day a good colony of bees will often bring in ten pounds or more of honey, so that Alice and Carl had figured that every good day would be worth easily a hundred dollars.
The next morning was warm, and the bees worked merrily. Now that the honey-flow had started, they were no longer cross. Their owners could walk up and down the rows of hives, through the clouds of flying bees that came almost as thick as snowflakes, and there was scarcely any danger of being stung. Carl was standing in the midst of this activity, observing the flight with satisfaction, when a volley of bees suddenly poured with a loud roaring from one of the hives nearest him.
“Swarm, Alice!” he yelled.
It was the first swarm of that season, and of course it came from one of the strongest colonies. Carl marked the hive that had sent it out and turned his attention to the bees in the air.
For some seconds the cloud of insects swirled round and round, then it drifted slowly toward the cabin. Finding no place to alight there, it floated irresolutely about in one direction and another, and finally moved down toward the river, flying about twenty feet from the ground.
Here it suddenly concentrated by a small cedar tree. A few bees settled on the tip of a long branch; in a moment there was a brown cluster, growing as he looked at it, and in five minutes the branch was bending down under the weight of a mass of bees that would nearly have filled a five-gallon pail.
“What a tremendously big swarm!” exclaimed Alice, who had come to look at it. “Did you see the hive they came from? Then let’s attend to it, and then we can hive the swarm.”
When they removed the cover of the hive that had swarmed, the super was seen to be nearly empty of bees, though it contained a good deal of fresh honey. Lifting it off, they saw that the brood-chamber also appeared sadly depleted. Fully two-thirds of the bees had gone with the swarm.
“Isn’t there any way of keeping them from swarming, Alice?” asked Carl. “We’d get so much more honey if the colonies didn’t break in two like this.”
“None,” Alice replied, busy with the smoker. “Except by seeing that they always have plenty of storage room for honey. They don’t usually swarm till they get crowded. This colony was probably feeling crowded before we put the super on it; they got the swarming idea fixed, and when the honey-flow started well, away they went.”