The boys sat down and watched. All the bees were certainly going straight toward Larue’s clearing, and they came heavily back, dropping by scores at the hives, almost too heavy to fly. In the course of an hour the activity had greatly increased.
“Yes, they’ve located it, all right,” said Bob. “They’re heading toward his barn, it seems to me. I wish I dared go and look, but we’d better be careful not to show our noses. Larue is probably on the watch.”
They put on the supers of empty combs to give storage room for the honey and went back to the cabin for dinner, laughing. But they were too much excited to stay long away from the ambushed hives, and they returned to them toward the middle of the afternoon. Alice was intensely anxious to be allowed to go with them, but the situation was highly delicate, and they decided that it was hardly safe.
When they came within a hundred yards of the hidden hives they heard the roar of the bees. Never before had they seen such a fury of work. A black belt, a river of bees, seemed to be flowing over the trees toward the clearing. The entrances were almost choked as the insects poured out and in, and the ground in front was covered with crawling bees that had dropped exhausted.
They were savagely cross, too, as bees always are when robbing is going on. There was fighting at the entrance of every hive, probably due to bees mistaking their doors in the new location. The whole front of the hive was brown with guards, and it was dangerous to go nearer than twenty feet. Bob had brought a veil with him, though, and he opened one of the supers. He received several stings on the hands, but reported that the combs were nearly half full already, and not with nectar, but with thick, ripened honey.
“No doubt at all that it’s our honey coming back,” he said. “I wonder what Mr. Larue thinks of all this. If we’re careful, he’ll never suspect that we had any hand in it. He’ll just take it as a kind of judgment for his thieving. But what oceans of bees seem to be going over. You wouldn’t think that half a dozen hives could send out so many.”
“I’ve a notion that the bees from the home yard are coming here too,” said Carl. “Just look in the air.”
In fact, a long air-line of bees could be discerned going straight up the river above the trees. It was a long flight, of course, but bees have been known to go four or five miles when honey is scarce. Perhaps the home apiary might have found the stolen honey even if they had not moved any bees.
During that afternoon the excitement rose to a perfect frenzy. A torrent of bees swept overhead, from the ambushed hives to the clearing and up the river toward home. The boys began to grow uneasy; as Carl had said, no power on earth could stop things now, and it looked rather as if they had unlocked forces that were too much for them. Carl hastened home to look at conditions there, and came back breathless, reporting the apiary in a turmoil. Bees were flying, robbing, fighting and bringing in honey. Many of the colonies had not yet learned where the honey was coming from, and were flying around the cabin in clouds, or trying to pounce on some weaker colony.
“But there must be over a million bees going to the Frenchman’s place,” he said. “I think we ought to try to find out what’s going on there. The whole family may be stung to death.”