Meanwhile Alice had uncapped a fresh set of four combs, and a pool of honey was forming in the bottom of the extractor. It was so thick that it ran very slowly down the sides, but within a few minutes it stood several inches deep. Bob drew off a pailful through the gate, and poured it through the cheese-cloth strainer into one of the tanks. It was almost water-clear, thick and rich—honey of the very highest grade.
Bob then returned to the hives and began to bring in supers single-handed, taking back the sets of emptied combs and replacing them on the hives. He was able to attend to this duty as fast as Alice and Carl could uncap and extract. At noon, when Alice stopped work to prepare dinner, they had extracted almost six hundred pounds of honey. It was the harvest from fourteen hives.
“Why, that isn’t half bad,” said Alice, after making this calculation. “That amounts to about forty-five pounds per hive. Better than I expected from this poor season.”
“We may have more honey than we think,” said Carl, brightening. “But we must get ahead faster, or it’ll take us all the week.”
During the afternoon they managed to empty the supers of twenty-one colonies. But these were not quite so well filled, and yielded only a little more than seven hundred pounds.
That night it rained—the longed-for rain, now too late to be of service. Early the next morning they set to work again, but had to stop taking off honey on account of a fresh downpour. In the midst of the rain the wagon arrived from Morton with the nine hundred honey-pails.
“Couldn’t we send some of it back with him?” suggested Alice.
So they begged the teamster to wait a few hours, and set to work furiously, filling the tins from the tanks. Bob sat by the tank with a mountain of five-pound pails beside him, filling them rapidly from the open honey-gate. Once full, he passed them to Alice, who wiped them clean and put on the covers; then Carl nailed them up again in their shipping crates.
At noon they ate a hasty, cold luncheon, and again set feverishly to work at the pails. They made such speed that at four o’clock they were able to start the wagon back with a load of two hundred five-pound pails of honey.
The rain had stopped, and they began to take off honey and extract again. They were getting rather tired, and the task before them seemed endless. It was the twenty-ninth of the month. It seemed hardly possible that they could put up all that honey and turn it into cash in less than three days.