"Go ahead," said I. "I'll be delighted."
And the little bee told me the following story.
Once upon a time, a great many years ago, the Queen of the bees sent to the Lord High Treasurer of her kingdom for his annual report, and when it came she was very much surprised to find that the treasury contained about half as much treasure as she had supposed.
"Where is the rest of the money?" she demanded in severe tones.
"We haven't had it, your Majesty," said the Lord High Treasurer.
"Haven't we earned it?" she asked.
"Yes," replied the Lord High Treasurer. "But we haven't been able to sell all the honey we've made. We've been too industrious."
"It is impossible to be too industrious," said the Queen. "Send the Trade Secretary here."
The Trade Secretary came at once, and bore out all that the Lord High Treasurer had said. The bees had made more honey than they could sell.
"Then we must have a mass-meeting and tell all the beeple," she observed.
"The what?" I asked, interrupting the bee's story.
"The beeple. You folks are people. We bees are beeple," explained my little visitor.
I laughed, and he continued:
"Tell the beeple," said the Queen, "and at once, because when they read your report and see how little profit we have gained for our labors this year they may become suspicious. If we tell them at once, as soon as we have discovered it ourselves, they cannot complain."
And so the mass-meeting was called, and ten thousand bees gathered before the royal hives.
The Queen undertook to tell the beeple herself.
"Most beloved subjects," said she, as she emerged from the royal hive amid the enthusiastic buzzing of the beepulace, "I have been going over the report of my Trade Secretary during the past week, and I regret to say that the showing is not satisfactory."
A murmur of disappointment greeted the announcement.
"We have not been idle, your Majesty!" cried one of the workers. "I myself have flown from flower to flower for five hours a day every day during the season, and I can testify that all my friends and neighbors have kept themselves equally busy."
"I have nothing to complain about on that score," returned her Majesty, graciously. "Indeed, you have all been most industrious. Even the drones have droned to my satisfaction."
"Have we then worked too hard?" queried another.
"It would seem so," returned her Majesty. "Either that or after a fashion which might be termed unprofitable. We have manufactured seventeen million pounds of honey in the last year, and after all the demands of the honey-eaters have been fulfilled we find ourselves with ten million pounds on hand."
"It proves how useful we do-nothing bees are," said one of the drones. "Had we worked, the supply would have been twice as great, and instead of having ten million pounds of honey more than we need, we should have twenty-seven million pounds of it upon our antennæ."
"We've got no business with antennæ, anyhow," growled another drone. "Why can't we have beetennæ, and be done with it?"
"All of this!" cried the Queen, impatiently, "is apart from the question. Whether we have antennæ, beetennæ, or flytennæ, we have made too much honey."
"Then let us rest for a year," sighed one of the drones. "It's mathematics that if one does enough work in one year to last for two years, he's done two years' work in one, wherefore let him take a year off and travel for his health."
"Not so!" cried the Queen. "The Lord High Commissioner of the Police will arrest the drone who has spoken so unreasonably, and suggested such an unbeely practice as idleness. Put him in the darkest dungeon of the Bee-stile, and feed him upon iced water and cold biscuit crumbs for twenty-four hours."
"Mercy!" cried the drone. "Mercy, your Majesty! I was only thoughtless."
"You do well," quoth the Queen, "to appeal to my mercy, and I will be merciful. I will remit half of the sentence. Lock him up for twenty-four hours, but do not feed him at all."
The thoughtless drone was arrested and taken away, and the Queen resumed.
"It's not that we work too hard," she said. "It is that we make too much of one kind of thing. If the honey consumers only want ten million pounds of honey, it is foolish for us to make twenty million pounds of it, and I think we should turn our attention to other fields."
"I did," said one. "I brought a country doctor five dollars by stinging a small boy."
"How often have I told you not to sting small boys?" frowned the Queen.
"I couldn't help it, your Majesty," returned the bee, humbly. "I was flying along a garden path, and the small boy came running up; he ran so fast he collided with me, and ere I knew it my stinger had penetrated his flesh."
"You had no business to have your stinger out," said the Queen.
"Oh yes, your Majesty," explained the bee, "I had to have it out, for I had come to that garden to sharpen it upon the grindstone of the boy's father. Had the boy been looking where he was going, it would not have happened."
"Ah!" said the Queen, smiling with pleasure; "that is different. If you taught the small boy a lesson you worked to some purpose, and you are forgiven. I don't see, however, how you still live if you really stung the child. Pray explain."
"He was a tender little chap—that is all," said the bee. "And I had no trouble in pulling my sting out of his soft little cheek. It was like a peach."
Again the Queen smiled. "I am pleased with you," she said, and then turning again to the assembled multitude, she resumed her speech.
"Now that we know what our trouble is, shall we not act accordingly? Shall we continue year in and year out wasting our valuable time in the making of honey that nobody wants, or shall we look about for something new to do which, after we have made all the honey that is needed, shall still keep us busy, so that people seeing us shall be able to call us 'the busy bees' as of yore? What is the will of my subjects?"
"Let us branch out! Let us do other things," buzzed the beepulace.
"I knew my confidence in your judgment was not misplaced," cried the Queen, joyously. "It now remains for us to decide what, and I here to-day in the presence of you all as witnesses proclaim my intention to give the hand of my eldest daughter to that one of you who shall suggest the scheme that shall seem best for our new line of action."
"Suppose it's won by a lady bee?" cried a woman's-rights bee in the throng. "She won't want your daughter's hand."
"She shall have the hand of my eldest son," replied the Queen bee, with a smile.
The reply seemed to satisfy the woman's-right's bee, and the Queen having retired to her royal cell, the crowd broke up, and the various members of it betook their way to their respective hives to cogitate upon the problem presented by the Queen.
On the day following the royal proclamation was found posted all over Beeland, in which it was announced that a committee, consisting of the Queen, the Trade Secretary, and the Lord High Treasurer of the country would receive the various plans presented, go over them carefully, and on Christmas day following make known whatever decision they might have reached. This method was satisfactory to all hands, and the bees busied themselves for ten and fifteen hours a day thinking up schemes. It was a long time to think, but bees have very small heads, and they had to think quite as much as that daily to reach any conclusion at all. Some of them got very sick with brain-fever from trying to think too much, and one little worker went crazy because he was so foolish as to cogitate for forty-nine hours without rest. Many of the lighter-headed bees soon gave it up, but the wiser ones, thinking moderately and not too deeply all at once, soon had their schemes mapped out and placed in the committee's hands, or antennæ.
The autumn went rapidly. Christmas came, and the committee examined the plans that were presented.
"I must say," the Queen said, with a sigh, after reading a large number of foolish schemes, "it doesn't seem to me that my subjects are as bright as they might be. The idea of this fellow suggesting that we go into the 'horse-bothering business'!"
The Trade Secretary laughed. "What on earth is the 'horse-bothering business'?" he asked.
"He wants individual bees to hire themselves out to farmers with slow horses," said the Queen. "Their duty is to bother the horses until they get skittish and try to run."
"Hoh!" laughed the Lord High Treasurer; "what a donkey that bee must be!"
"Here's another," observed the Trade Secretary, opening a sealed envelope. "He wants us to go into the carrier-pigeon business. He says there is nothing can strike a bee-line so accurately as a bee, and adds that he thinks a whole swarm ought to be able to earn from fifteen to twenty dollars a month at it."
"How very foolish," said the Queen, impatiently. "It would take a whole swarm a month to carry a single message a mile. I do hope that isn't going to turn out to be the best suggestion of all, for I should be most unhappy if I had to give the hand of my eldest daughter to a bee like that."
"You may relieve your mind on that score," said the Trade Secretary. "I have just found another which is much better. This bee suggests that when we are not gathering honey and making honey-combs, it wouldn't be a bad thing to fly about barber-shops and gather hair and make hair-combs."
"I think that is very foolish," said the Queen. "Why do you think it is better than the horse-bothering and the carrier-pigeon plans?"
"It's no more foolish, and twice as funny," explained the Trade Secretary.
"That is very true," said the Queen.
"Here's another that's funnier yet," said the Lord High Treasurer. "This one says that we might gather curry and make curry-combs."
The Queen laughed outright. "I think they'd better start a comic paper," she said.
"That's the best idea yet," cried the Trade Secretary, enthusiastically, for he was a great flatterer. "Let us decide on that, and then your Majesty can keep your eldest daughter's hand as a reward for some future competition."
"No," said the Queen, shaking her head; "that would never do. I shall not enter into this competition at all. The others would say, and very properly too, that I was partial to my own plan, and couldn't be a good judge of its merit. No; you must leave my plans out altogether."
And so they went on examining the plans, none of which seemed any better or funnier than the ones I have mentioned, until they came to what appeared to be a grand scheme.
"I suggest," wrote one little bee, "that we keep on making honey just the same, only instead of putting it together in one great lot, all tasting alike, let us keep different kinds in different combs. For instance, let one swarm gather from roses and make rose honey; another can sip the nectar from the violet and make violet honey; another can get the essence of the mint and mix it with pepper and make peppermint honey, and so on. Let us have honey of all flavors—vanilla, sarsaparilla, and so on—and then we shall never make too much. There never was too much soda-water in the world, because if you get tired of one kind you can drink another kind. I heard a little girl who was a soda-water expert say so, and it was from her remark that I got the idea. If I've won, please let me know, and I'll come up to the palace and get the hand of the Queen's eldest daughter; and if you'll send me word early enough in the day, with the size of her hand, I'll bring a nice little glove to put on it. P. S.—Do we get only one hand, or does the whole daughter go with it?"
"Magnificent!" cried the Queen, in ecstasy, clapping her antennæ together. "We must award the prize to him."
"I think so myself," said the Trade Secretary, "he is certainly the most original."
"And a good business bee, too," said the Lord High Treasurer. "What he asks about the whole daughter proves that."
"And a good husband he'll make," said the Queen, with a pleased expression. "His thinking about her gloves proves that. Are there any others?"
"Only one," said the Trade Secretary. "From a bee who signs himself 'A Poet.'"
"Oh, he can't win!" said the Queen, impatiently, for she had the idea which many wiser people have that poets are lazy.
"Not likely," said the Lord High Treasurer. "I still think, your Majesty, that we ought to read what he suggests."
"Very well; no doubt you are right. What is it he says?" said the Queen, with a look of resignation on her face.
So they read the suggestion of the little poet bee, and this is the way it went:
"We have made too much plain honey
For the people's ready money;
And the only way to keep our daily toil from being waste
Is to give them something neater,
Something purer, something sweeter,
Something quite the like of which they never yet have had a taste.
"Shall we then spend all our hours
Sipping up the sweets of flowers,
Sipping sweets of which they tell us that they don't want any more?
Or shall we set our forces
Seeking out some other sources
Which will yield a store of honey of a kind not known before?
"Oh, I know where there is nectar
Fit for Jupiter or Hector;
'Tis a sweet no bee has ever tried to put into his comb.
'Tis a sweet I say of which, sir,
In the mansions of the rich, sir,
Or the poorest is the sweetest of the sweets of any home.
"Tis the nectar of the kisses
Of the babies—learn what bliss is!—
Gather that and put it into all the honey that you can,
And you'll find e'en the Immortals
Thronging daily at your portals
With rich jewels for the product that will follow from my plan."
There was a long silence when the Trade Secretary had finished reading the poet's suggestion. The Queen wiped her eyes. She was manifestly touched by the sentiment of the poet's little verse. Finally the Lord High Treasurer spoke.
"I'm not much of a judge of poetry," he said, "so I won't say much about the verse, except that I don't think he ought to have lugged Hector in just for the sake of a rhyme; but I do think it is a beautiful idea. I kissed a baby once in a country garden, and it was so fearfully sweet that all the flowers tasted like lemons for months afterwards."
"I have had the same experience," said the Queen, softly.
"Me too!" said the Trade Secretary. "The plan is a fine one."
"But is it finer than the other one?" asked the Queen. "I, as a mother, think it is."
"I, as a business bee, think not," said the Lord High Treasurer.
"Well, I, as a business bee and a father, can't make up my mind," sighed the Trade Secretary. "It's very unfortunate. One ought to be better than the other, but I can't decide which is the one."
"They can't both have my eldest daughter's hand," sighed the Queen.
"No," said the Lord High Treasurer, with a dubious shake of his head.
"True," ejaculated the Trade Secretary; and then he gave a loud buzz of triumph. "Why didn't we think of it before?" he cried.
"Of what?" asked the Queen, eagerly.
"Your eldest daughter is twins," cried the Trade Secretary. "One can have one twin and the other the other."
"So they are!" said the Queen, joyously. "I had forgotten that. Their hands shall be awarded as you suggest."
And so it was decided; and on Christmas morning the announcement was made. To one bee one daughter was affianced, and to the other the other, and all were satisfied; and on New-Year's day, a week later, they were all four married, and lived happily ever after.
The little bee stopped here and looked at me.
"That's a very nice little tale," said I, smiling upon my friend the bee.
"Thank you," said he. "If you like it you can have it all for your own."