[IN FUZZY'S GLASS HOUSE]
Fuzzy was distinguished from most of her brothers and sisters, when we first became acquainted with her, by the fine head of hair which she had. It has been several weeks now since we first saw her, and there are bald places already—so strenuous has been her life. To be sure that we should be able to recognize her even after she became worn and bald, like the others, we dabbed a spot of white paint on her back between the shoulders, and although old age and its attendant ills, including the loss of much of her hair, have come on rapidly, the white spot is still there, and we know Fuzzy whenever we see her.
We were watching what was going on in Fuzzy's glass house at the very time that Fuzzy first came out of her six-sided little private nursery room. In this she had spent all of her three weeks of getting hatched from an egg—we had seen her own very egg laid by the queen mother!—then of living as a helpless baby bee without wings or feet or eyes or feelers, and having to be fed bee-jelly and bee-bread by the nurses, and then as a slowly maturing young bee with legs and wings and eyes and feelers all forming and growing. Part of this time she had been shut up in her room by having the door sealed with wax, and she had had no food at all. But she had been fed enough at first to last her through the days when she had no food.
It was the twentieth or twenty-first day since she had been born, that is, had hatched from the little, long, white, seed-like egg that the queen bee had laid in this six-sided waxen room or cell. And Fuzzy was all ready to come out into the world. So she tried her strong new trowel-like jaws on the thin waxen door of her room, and found no trouble at all in biting a hole through it large enough to let her wriggle out. Which she did right under our very eyes.
Indeed we had planned Fuzzy's glass house and had had it built in the way you see it in Sekko's picture just so we could see plainly and certainly what goes on in the house of a bee family. Everybody has watched bees outside gather pollen and drink nectar and hang in great swarms, and do the various other things they do in their outdoor life. But not everybody has seen what goes on indoors. Many people have seen the inside of a hive every now and then. But it is always when the bees are greatly excited and often when the people are too. And so besides seeing that the honey and pollen are in such and such combs and cells and the young bees in others, some of them in open and some in closed cells, and perhaps a few other things, one doesn't learn much by peering into a hive through a mass of smoke-dazed bees while dodging a few extra-lively and energetic ones!