r three young swarms every year;
that is one of them in the white, tall hive there at the end of the
shed.

"Last year robber bees came out of the woods and attacked that hive with
the red cap-piece on it. Ad watched them all through one day and threw
hot water on the robbers. You'll see lots of excitement here when a
swarm comes out and grandfather has to hive them. They got fifty cents a
pound for the honey one year; but it isn't so high now. In the winter
the hives stand right out in the cold and snowdrifts. In February, last
winter, the drift in front of the shed was higher than the shed itself.
Grandfather stops up the holes into the hives, that's all; and in March,
before the snow is gone, the bees sometimes come out and get the
honey-sap on the birch and maple logs, when the men-folks are working up
the big woodpile in front of the wood-shed."

Ellen and Wealthy saw us talking by the bee-house, and approached the
garden gate. "Come down here, girls, and get acquainted with our new
cousin," Theodora called to them.

"Don't say much to them at first," she continued to me in a lower tone.
"They are bashful."

Being in much the same case, I looked another way while the two girls
joined us, Theodora having for the moment directed my attention to a
tremendously large queen bumble-bee which came booming along the ground
and began burrowing in a little heap of dry grass.

"Halstead says those big bumble-bees are the kings," Wealthy ventured to
remark.

"Well, that is not right," said Ellen. "For Ad says they are the
queens."

Theodora looked at me and laughed. "You see Ad's word is law," she said.
"But now I want to show you Gram's geese."

We climbed the garden wall and went around a large shed which joined the
"west barn" and then down into a little hollow behind it, where a rill
from a spring had been dammed to form a goose-pond, fifty or sixty feet
across. Near by the pond, in the edge of a potato field, we found the
geese, seven of them and a gander, which latter extended an aquatic,
pink beak and hissed his displeasure at our approach. "Go back, Job!"
Theodora said to him; Wealthy stepped to the rear of the others, being
still a little afraid of "Job." He was a grievous biter, Theodora
informed me, and had bitten her several times, till she had given him a
switching for it.

"Two old geese are sitting on eggs in a goose-house, under the shed,
near the barn," Ellen said. "That's what makes Job so valiant