By the middle of June the original three colonies were building up well enough that Walt agreed Caleb could consider carefully timed expansion. A healthy colony needed enough adult workers, brood and stores to support a split without leaving the parent hive dangerously weak. The older man made him calculate how many frames he could afford to move and asked what would happen if a late nectar flow failed. Caleb learned quickly that a beekeeper could double the number of boxes and still reduce the number of bees capable of surviving the following winter.
"You don't count colonies the way a man counts fence posts," Walt said. "A weak box and a strong box aren't two equal successes."
Caleb wanted fifteen colonies before winter. He had written the number at the top of a page, underlined it twice, and pictured the tidy rows in his yard humming like a machine. Walt crossed out the underline and wrote a different question beside it: HOW MANY HEALTHY COLONIES CAN YOU MANAGE WELL? The boy was annoyed until the next week, when one colony's food stores declined unexpectedly and another required a closer look at its brood pattern. He spent two evenings dealing with actual problems instead of polishing his goal.
His first expansion came partly through the same conversations that had yielded the old equipment. Two experienced keepers in neighboring counties had surplus spring nucleus colonies available from inspected and managed stock, and a local grower agreed to help Caleb pay for several in exchange for future pollination work if the colonies developed adequately. Martha insisted that the arrangement be written down, specifying that the future work would depend on colony strength and that Caleb would not promise more than he could deliver. Thomas contributed lumber for additional stands, while Caleb continued earning money through odd jobs and put nearly every dollar into sound frames, feeders and other necessities.
By July there were more than a dozen occupied hive boxes behind the shed, though Caleb was careful in his ledger to distinguish established colonies from smaller developing splits. Not every box held a workforce large enough for pollination, and not every colony was producing surplus honey. He had repaired much of the wood himself, sometimes reusing a sound board from one abandoned box to replace an unsound side on another. He kept all suspect and irreparable material away from the living apiary and accepted Walt's repeated reminder that safety mattered more than the satisfaction of rescuing another piece of old equipment.
Dylan became a familiar sight in a white veil with the sleeves of his protective suit rolled slightly too high until Walt scolded him. He had begun helping because the project seemed funny, then discovered that working with a living colony demanded a kind of attention he had never needed when fixing a fence. He could be loud anywhere else, but around the bees he learned to speak softly, move predictably and listen when Caleb asked him to wait. He still complained when he was stung and still accused the bees of holding grudges.
"They don't know your name," Caleb told him.
"Then how do they keep picking me?"
"You're the one who keeps standing in their flight path."
"That sounds like exactly the kind of excuse somebody makes for their friends," Dylan said.