"That's what Mary was telling me," said Phil, gravely. "But I must confess I never got much out of them. I investigated them once when I was a small boy—stirred up the hive with a stick, and by the time I was rescued I was pretty well puffed up. Not with a sense of my wisdom, however. They stung me nearly to death. So I've rather shrunk from having any more dealings with them."
"You can't deny that they gave you a good lesson in minding your own business," laughed Lloyd.
"Well, I don't care to have so many teachers after me, all teaching me the same thing. I prefer variety in my instructors."
"They don't all teach the same thing," cried Joyce, enthusiastically. "I had no idea how the work was divided up until I began to study them. People have watched them through glass hives, you know, with black shutters. They have nurses to tend the nymphs and larvæ, and ladies of honour, who wait on the queen, and never let her out of their sight. And isn't it odd, they are exactly like human beings in one thing, they never turn their back on the queen. Then there are the house bees, who both air and heat the hives by fanning their wings, and sometimes they help to evaporate the honey in the same way, when there is more water in the flower nectar than usual. There are architects, masons, waxworkers, and sculptors, and the foragers, who go out to the flowers for the pollen and nectar. Some are chemists, who let a drop of formic acid fall from the end of their stings to preserve the honey, and some are capsule makers, who seal down the cells when the honey is ripe. Besides all these are the sweepers, who spend their time sweeping the tiny streets, and the bearers, who remove the corpses, and the amazons of the guard, who watch by the threshold night and day, and seem to require some kind of a countersign of all who pass, just like real soldiers. Some are artists, too, as far as knowing colours is concerned. They get red pollen from the mignonette, and yellow pollen from the lilies, and they never mix them. They always store them in separate cells in the storerooms."
"Whew!" whistled Phil, beginning to fan himself with his hat as Joyce paused. "Anything more? It takes a girl with a fad to deluge a fellow with facts."
"Tell him about the drones," said Lloyd, meaningly. She resented being laughed at. "They don't like the school of the bees eithah. If Aristotle and Cato and Pliny and those old philosophahs could spend time studying them, you needn't tuh'n up yoah nose at them!"
Lloyd turned away indignantly, but she looked so pretty with her eyes flashing, and the colour coming up in her cheeks, that Phil was tempted to keep on teasing them about their fad, as he called it. His antagonism to it was all assumed at first, but he began to feel a real resentment as the days wore on. It interfered too often with his plans. Several times he had walked up to the ranch to find Mr. Ellestad there ahead of him with a new book on bee culture, or an interesting account of some new experiment, or some ride was spoiled because, when he called, the girls had gone to Shaw's ranch to spend the afternoon.
Joyce and Lloyd purposely pointed all their morals, and illustrated all their remarks whenever they could, by items learned at the School of the Bees, until Phil groaned aloud whenever the little honey-makers were mentioned.
"If you had been Shapur you nevah would have followed that bee to the Rose Garden of Omah, would you?" asked Lloyd, one day when they had been discussing the legend of Camelback.
"No," answered Phil, "nothing could tempt me to follow one of those irritating little creatures."