Some days we found Fuzzy at work with several companions on more prosaic and commonplace things about the house; chores they might be called. She had to help clean house occasionally. For the bees are extremely cleanly housekeepers, with a keen eye for all fallen bits of wax, or bodies of dead bees, or any kind of dirt that might come from the housekeeping of so large a family. Every day the hive is thoroughly cleaned. If there comes a day when it is not, that is a bad sign. There is something wrong with the bee community. They haven't enough food, or they are getting sick, or something else irregular and distressing is happening.
Also the house has to be "calked" occasionally to keep out draughts and more particularly creeping enemies of the hive, like bee-moths and bee-lice. The cracks are pasted over with propolis, which is made from resin or gum brought in from certain trees. If something gets into the hive that can't be carried out, then the bees cover it up with propolis. If they find a bee-moth grub in a crack where they can't get to it to sting it to death, they wall it up, a living prisoner, with propolis. Once our bees kept coming in with a curious new kind of propolis; a greenish oily-looking stuff that stuck to their legs and got on their faces and bodies and wouldn't clean off. We discovered that they were trying to unpaint a near-by house as fast as it was being freshly painted!
Fuzzy took her turn at all these odd jobs, and though she was beginning to show here and there a few places where her luxuriant hair was rubbed off a little, she was still as lively and willing and industrious as ever. Every day we liked her more and more and wished, how many times, that we could talk with her and tell her how much we liked her, and have her tell us how she enjoyed life in the glass house. But we could only watch her and keep acquainted with all her manifold duties and hope that nothing would happen to her on her long foraging trips for pollen and nectar and propolis. Whenever Mary and I came to the glass house and couldn't find Fuzzy, we were in a sort of fever of excitement and apprehension until she came in with her great loads of white or yellow or red pollen and went to shaking and dancing and whirling about in the extraordinary way that she and her mates have while hunting for a suitable pantry cell in which to unload her pollen-baskets. Sometimes she would walk and dance and whirl over almost all of the pollen-cells in the house before she would finally decide on one. Then she would stand over it and pry with the strong sharp spines on her middle legs at the solidly packed pollen loads on her hind legs, trying to loosen them so they would fall into the cell. Sometimes she simply couldn't get the pollen loads loose, and then a companion would help her. And after they were loosened and had fallen into the cell, she or a companion would ram her head down into the cell and pack and tamp the soft sticky pollen loads down into one even mass. And then how industriously she would clean herself, drawing her antennæ through the neat little antennæ combs on her front legs, and licking herself with her long flexible tongue, or getting licked by her mates all over.
Perhaps as she was washing herself after a hard foraging trip, the stately and graceful queen of the house would come walking slowly by, looking for empty cells in which to lay eggs. Then Fuzzy would turn around, head toward the queen, and form part of the little circle of honor that always kept forming and re-forming around the queen mother. For the honey-bee queen is the mother of all the great family, and her relation to the community is really the mother relation rather than that of a reigning queen. She does not order the bees; indeed, the worker bees seem to order her. They determine what cells she may have to lay eggs in and when she shall be superseded by a new queen. And when they decide for a new queen, they immediately set to work in a very interesting way to make one.
This is the way, as Mary and I saw it through the glass sides of Fuzzy's house. First, a little group of workers went to work tearing down, apparently, some comb already made; that is, they began on the lower edge of a brood-comb, in the cells of which the old queen had just laid eggs, to tear out the partitions between two or three of the cells. What became of the eggs we couldn't tell, for they are very small, and the bees were so crowded together that we could see only the general results of their activity. Soon it was evident that they were building as well as tearing down, and a new cell, much larger than the usual kind and quite different in shape, began to take form. It was like a thimble, only longer and slenderer, and it had the wide end closed and the narrower tapering end open. They worked excitedly and rapidly, and the new cell steadily grew in length. Never was it left alone for a minute. Always there were bees coming and going and always some clustered about. It was a constant center of interest and excitement.
Mary and I knew of course that this was a queen cell, and that at its base there was one of the eggs laid by the old queen in a worker cell. This egg hatched, we knew, in a few days, although we could not see the little grub, but nurse bees were about constantly besides the cell-builders, and all the bees that came to the wonderful new cell seemed to realize that a very important, if at present rather grubby and wholly helpless, personage was in it. The cell finally got to be more than an inch long, and at the end of five days it was capped. A lot of milky bee-jelly had been stored in it before capping. After this nothing happened for seven days.
Mary was in the room where the glass bee-houses are, and I was in an adjoining room, with the door between the two open. As I sat peering through my big microscope, I seemed to hear a curious unusual sound from the bee-room, a sort of piping rather high-pitched but muffled. Perhaps it was Mary trying a new song. She has a good assortment of noises. But now came another sound; lower-pitched but louder than the other; a trumpet-call, only of course not as loud as the soldiers' trumpets or the ones on the stage when the King is about to come in. Then the shrill piping again; and again the trumpet answer. And finally a third and new sound, but this last unmistakably a Mary sound. And with it came the dear girl herself, with her hair standing on—well, no, I cannot truthfully say standing on end, but trying to. And her eyes shooting sparks and her mouth open and her hands up.
"The bees," she gasped, "the bees are doing it!"
There was no doubt of what "it" meant. It was this sounding of pipes and trumpets; these battle calls.