All that afternoon they toiled, weary and silent, but still determined. The uncapping barrel was nearly full of oozy masses of comb, from which the honey drained slowly into a pail through a hole in the bottom. The three Harmans were smeared to the eyes with honey. They were stiff with stings, too, for the whole room was crawling with bees that had been brought in on the combs. They were underfoot, on the walls, in the cappings and the strainer, and a great mass had clustered on the window like a swarm.
By six o’clock there were scarcely half a dozen hives left uncleared in the apiary, though a large pile of unhandled supers had accumulated in the workroom. They stopped work, and the boys helped Alice to get supper.
“But we’re not going to get through in time,” said Bob, anxiously. “It’ll take us nearly all of to-morrow to extract and can up the rest of the honey. Then it’ll take some time to get it sold.”
“But we’ve got to get through in time!” cried Alice. “Are we going to fail now by just a few hours?”
“Well, let’s finish the extracting to-night—work till it’s done,” Bob proposed.
“All right,” replied Carl, wearily. “I’m game!”
So after supper they attacked their task afresh. The boys tried to get all the supers into the house while daylight lasted. They worked hard, but the last supers were very heavy, the bees were cross as night came on, and darkness had fallen before they got the last one in. Alice placed several beeswax candles about the room, and they began to extract.
Hour after hour the whir and rattle of the extractor went on. It was almost the only sound in the room, for they were too tired to talk. The pile of full supers went down, and the empty ones went up, till they clogged the room, and had to be carried outdoors. Alice uncapped till she could no longer hold the slippery knife-handle, and Carl took her place, while she drew off honey from the extractor into the tanks. It was hot in the choked little room, reeking with the odor of honey and the smell of the candles and the tankful of wet cappings, and occasionally they went outdoors for a few minutes to cool off and breathe a little.
“Alice said that bee-keeping was kid-glove work—nothing heavy or hard about it,” remarked Carl ironically during one of these rests.
It seemed to be tacitly understood that they were to keep at it till the honey was all extracted, and they stayed doggedly at work despite weariness and stings. It was shortly after one o’clock when they emptied the last super; they were all saturated with honey and perspiration; the uncapping tank was heaped with wax, and the candles had burned low. All the tanks were brimful, and there was over a hundred pounds in the reservoir of the extractor.