Bob waved his hand triumphantly toward the river. He had come from Morton by water, in a second-hand boat that he had bought cheaply in the village. It was not beautiful; it was a homemade affair, which could be poled, paddled, or rowed, or perhaps sailed too. It was old and rough and needed painting badly, but it was water-tight and had cost only nine dollars. Alice was enchanted; a boat was what she had been longing for most of all.
Bob had had rather a hard up-stream pull, for he brought quite a cargo with him besides his trunk—potatoes, dried apples, prunes, butter, flour, and two more cases of bee-supplies.
“And here’re your queens,” he added, taking a package from his pocket.
There were seven mailing-cages, six tied in one parcel, and the other, containing the three-dollar breeding queen, by itself. Carl looked through the wire gauze cover at this valuable insect, surrounded by her attendants.
“She doesn’t look any bigger or better than the rest of them,” he complained.
“Wait till we see how she performs,” said Alice, hopefully.
The mailing-cages were small, hollowed-out wooden blocks, covered on one side with wire cloth; each contained an Italian queen, with half a dozen attendant bees, that had traveled all the way in the mail-bags from Tennessee. One small compartment in each cage was filled with soft candy, and most of this had been eaten on the journey.
As these queens had already been too long confined, Alice at once made preparations for introducing them—a matter of no small difficulty. For a colony of bees, even if deprived of their queen, will not easily accept a strange one. They prefer the more lengthy plan of raising a batch of queen-cells, and will kill any new queen put into the hive. Sometimes, however, they can be thrown into a panic by smoking and beating on the hive, and the new queen slipped in while they are too demoralized to notice her. The more common plan, however, is the one that Alice adopted.
She had already selected seven colonies where the queens appeared to be laying badly, and she now searched these queens out and killed them. Tearing off a strip of pasteboard on one end of a mailing-cage, she revealed a small hole plugged with soft honey-candy; then she pushed the cage into the hive, down between the combs. The bees would at once eat out the candy, thus opening the hole and releasing the queen, and the sweet would put them in a good humor, so that they would be likely to accept her without trouble.
All but one of the seven were safely introduced. The seventh was found next morning dead in front of the hive where the bees had thrown her body out. Luckily it was not the three-dollar queen.