For the next three days the weather was indeed perfect, and the bees did marvelously well. A visit to the new apiary by the lake showed that the colonies there were also storing heavily and needed supers. They had never expected this yard to yield any surplus honey this season, but the bees were actually crowding the queen out of the combs with the rush of new honey.
“We’ll have to get a team and have a load of supers hauled over,” said Alice. “One thing’s certain—next season we must have a horse and wagon of our own. We must have paid out over fifty dollars for team-hire this summer, and now we’ll have to have all these supers hauled home again for extracting.”
However, they had to have a quantity of lumber brought out from Morton to make winter cases for the increased number of colonies, and the teamster moved the load of supers while he was there. The management of the bees during this late honey-flow was simple. Bees rarely swarm after midsummer, and they only needed to be let alone to fill their empty combs with the honey from the willow-herb, whose crimson spikes were visible everywhere. Exploring the woods the apiarists found it in immense quantities in every burned slash; they had seen the green plants often enough during the summer, but had not recognized it until it came in bloom. There appeared to be forage for hundreds of colonies.
Raspberries were ripe now, and the Harmans gathered quarts. They might have gathered barrels, if they had had any means of disposing of them. They ate them in every possible manner—raw, stewed, in pies, but mainly with fresh, extracted honey poured over them, which they found to be a dish worthy of any epicure’s attention. Alice also made a great quantity of jam with some sugar that was left from the spring feeding, and filled up all the remaining honeypails.
It was the fruitful season of the wilderness. Game was growing more plentiful. The woods and streams were full of the new broods of partridges and ducks, strong-winged now and wary. Hares were everywhere, and once, while picking berries, Carl caught a glimpse of a black bear. It was only a glimpse, for the bear vanished like lightning, but Carl carried a rifle after that when he went for berries.
He carried it in vain, but it occurred to him that the lakeside apiary was terribly exposed to a bear’s depredations, and he carried the big trap over there, and set it among the hives. He found the yard in perfect safety, and the bees storing honey fast in nearly all the supers.
All through the latter part of August the weather remained warm and clear. Not much rain fell, but light showers came often enough to keep the fireweed from drying up, and the bees were busily at work almost every day. And now Alice set to work to improve the breed of the bees by queen-rearing operations.
To transform a black colony into Italians, it is only necessary to exchange their queen for an Italian queen. In the course of a couple of months the old generation of black bees will all have died, and all the newly hatched brood will be the offspring of the Italian mother. But Alice could not afford to buy any more queens, and she had determined to rear them herself.
The rearing of thoroughbred queens is a special art in itself. Any colony, if deprived of its queen, will raise a number of queen-cells to produce another, but these cells will of course be from eggs laid by the old queen, and the new queen will be of the same breed. To change the breed it is necessary to manœuver a substitution without the bees being aware of it.
Alice began by killing the queen of one of the black colonies that had proved bad-tempered and a poor honey-gatherer. For four days, then, she let the hive alone. At the end of that time she went over all the combs and cut out every queen-cell that had been started.