“I paid a dollar and a half for this queen last year,” said Alice, “and—look, there she is now.”
She indicated a point about the center of the comb, where the queen, twice the length of a worker-bee but much more slender, was walking slowly and with dignity over the cells, looking into each one to see if it held anything. Finding one unoccupied, she gravely inserted the point of her long abdomen into it and deposited an egg. During this process she was attentively watched by her own guard of half a dozen bees, who kept their heads always pointed toward her, and proffered her honey on their tongues when she had finished. Day and night, Alice explained, this went on, a good queen often laying a couple of thousand eggs in twenty-four hours. These eggs, hatching in three weeks, mean a vast army of workers for the honey harvest.
“This colony brought me in more than twenty-five dollars last year, all by itself,” said Alice, putting the comb carefully back into the hive. “It gathered something over a hundred pounds of comb honey, worth twenty-five cents a pound. If one had a whole apiary like that!—but such things never happen. On the average, it’s a good colony that makes ten dollars’ worth of honey, and less than that, of course, if you were running a large apiary and only getting wholesale prices.”
“Well, I call that good enough,” remarked Bob and said no more until that evening after supper, when he consented to bring out what was in his mind.
“It was only a vague notion that I got in my head,” he explained, “from what Alice said about wanting a hundred hives of bees. Perhaps there’s nothing in it yet. I don’t know. But anyhow, there’s a fellow in our class who lives at a place called Morton, away up in northern Haliburton, and he mentioned to me about a month ago that a man up his way had a lot of bees for sale. I wasn’t especially interested then, but when I went back to town last time, I thought of it and made further inquiries. Then I wrote to the owner. Then I felt as if I ought to go up and look into the thing, so I went.”
“You’ve been there? How many hives? What’s it like?” cried Alice and Carl together.
“Just got back. Well, it’s about the wildest, roughest place I ever saw. The bee outfit is fourteen miles from the railroad, away back in the woods, and you can take your choice of driving over a fearfully rocky trail or going up the river in a boat or tramping it. The bees are on a deserted backwoods farm, where nobody has lived for nearly a year. Goodness knows why anybody ever went there in the first place. But the bees are there all right—a hundred and eighty colonies, all packed outdoors in big sawdust cases. It was too cold to open the hives, but the bees were flying and seemed in good shape. Very few, if any, were dead. Then there’s a great heap of apparatus stored in the barn, a honey-extractor, empty combs, supers for comb-honey, smokers—a regular outfit, in fact.”
“Yes, but the price?” demanded Carl, anxiously.
“Fifteen hundred dollars.”
“That settles it, then,” said Alice, with a disappointed sigh.