“Got them!” his brother exclaimed. “Looks as if they’d got you!”
Bob’s face was indeed a shocking sight. A bee-keeper usually becomes hardened to stings, so that they do not cause swellings; but Bob had not yet become sufficiently inoculated. There were big lumps on his forehead, one eye was nearly closed, his chin was lopsided, and both his hands were somewhat puffed. But he was highly elated at having recovered the swarm with the valuable queen, which they at once carefully restored to a hive.
“There, old lady!” said Carl, as he saw the yellow queen creep into the hive with her bees, “you’ve had enough wild life now, and you’d better settle down to business.”
Bob gave them a brief account of what had happened, while he helped them sort out the swarms, but in the course of another hour his eye closed so badly that he was obliged to retire to the cabin. Several more swarms had come out while he had been gone, but all of them had been recovered, and by that night they had twenty-eight new colonies more than they had bought.
The apiary was certainly far too crowded, and doubtless there would be still more swarming before the season was over. Some of them ought to be moved to another spot, and the sooner this could be done the better.
The next day was hot and dry. No honey appeared to be coming in, and no swarms went out, and early the following morning Carl paddled the boat down to Morton.
He had no difficulty in securing Mr. Farr’s written consent to moving part of the bees to the new location by the lake. He ordered a two-horse team and hayrack to come out to the apiary the next day, and came home with a roll of wire gauze and several papers of tacks.
It took a day to clear away the bushes and brush from the old road, but it was ready when the wagon arrived from Morton, and they moved fifty colonies the next night, in two loads. The next morning they moved another load by daylight. It was hard, tedious work to load and unload the heavy hives, and the wagon had to move slowly all the way. It was dangerous work, too; though the entrances of the hives were closed with wire gauze, an aperture might develop through which the bees could rush out, and the result would probably be stung horses, a runaway, and a line of smashed hives scattered along the road. One of the boys walked with a lighted smoker beside the load all the way, on the watch for possible trouble, and they all breathed much more freely when the hives were off the wagon.
They set them on large stones a few rods back from the water. Later they could make regular stands for them, and before another season, of course, they would have to build a small house for extracting and storing the apparatus.
For the present they contented themselves with a tiny hut no bigger than a piano-case, built of rough logs, in which to store tools and a few frames, extra hives, and odds and ends. Most of the colonies in the new yard were old ones that had swarmed and were weak in bees. They would gather no more surplus honey and would need little attention this year, but would build up strong for the next season.