“There must be half a square mile of basswood trees,” said Bob. “So we’d have a double chance, if the berries failed.”
“Yes, and the best is that there’s a road going to the place,” Carl added. “The old lumber road I told you about. It comes out on the road to Morton, a mile or so from here. It would only need a day or two with an ax to clear it out for a wagon to pass.”
“This yard is certainly getting crowded,” said Alice, thoughtfully. “With all the new swarms, we’ll have over two hundred colonies soon, and a hundred is as many as most locations will support. But what about the expense of moving? It would cost six dollars a day to get a team from Morton, and we’d have to build a honey-house there, too.”
“I believe it would pay us even if it cost a hundred dollars,” said Carl. “But I suppose we can’t do anything till some one goes to Morton and gets Mr. Farr’s permission to move them. The mortgage says they’re not to be moved without permission.”
This was undoubtedly the case, and, as none of them had time to go to the village just then, the matter was dropped temporarily. But new events speedily made it a live issue again.
A little warm rain fell in the afternoon, and next morning the honey-flow, which had been failing, began again profusely. And then, suddenly, a riot of swarming broke out among the bees.
A slow, light honey-flow always induces more swarming than a heavy one, and Alice had been nervous about the matter for some days. On this morning she went out with Carl to examine a few of the hives, and in the very first they found what they had feared to find—a cluster of the peanut-shaped queen-cells. They were not quite sealed, but would have been finished the next day, and the colony would have swarmed.
Carl cut them all out. This treatment usually delays swarming at any rate for a week, till the colony can raise a fresh batch of cells. But occasionally, when they have the swarming fever badly, they will swarm, cells or not, and it is, moreover, very difficult to make sure of destroying every cell on ten combs swarming with bees.
The next colony had three heavy supers of honey piled on top of the brood-chamber, and when they got down to it at last they found no signs of swarming. But the third colony had cells just started.
Growing uneasy, they went to look at the hive where the three-dollar queen had been placed. They could not afford to let that queen lead her bees away to the woods, but there was not much danger of it, for a queen less than a year old seldom swarms.