All these things, and whatever other new ones came up in the next few days in connection with taking care of the babies, she seemed to understand right away, and indeed she seemed to know how to do all her work without having to reason about it, or to observe and draw conclusions; in fact, without even once really having to think about it at all. And because it was all so simple, and so easy to understand, an extraordinary thing came to pass with Nuova; that is, an extraordinary thing for a bee. The thing was that Nuova got tired of her work!
Yes, she got tired of it; tired physically, which is not perhaps so extraordinary, for bees sometimes fall dead from being over-tired physically; but she also got tired and impatient of the simplicity and monotony of what she was doing. She got, I suppose we may fairly say, mentally and spiritually tired of it. Which happening marks Nuova as a bee of a strange and rare kind: a bee that is—is—well, all I can say is, a bee that is different. Other bees, if they had known of it, would have called her a "funny" bee, or a "peculiar" bee; or perhaps something worse. Indeed, this something worse is just what she was soon called. For Nuova, after a few days of this steady care of babies, one hot afternoon—the hive was so set in the garden that it was quite exposed to the sun—Nuova, I say, one hot afternoon stopped working, and crawled slowly down past the great pear-shaped cell clear to the lower edge of the comb and there she sat and simply did nothing!
Pretty soon Uno, one of the nurse bees in Nuova's group, who had already shown herself to have a rather spiteful nature, noticed that Nuova was not working, was not, indeed, to be seen anywhere about the nurse cells. So she touched another nurse bee near her, named Due, with her antennæ so as to call her attention, and said in a low voice: "Where is Nuova?"
Due looked around, and not seeing Nuova, said: "Why, where is she?" Then both bees touched a third nurse bee, named Tre, with their antennæ. She turned around and joined them.
"What's the matter?" she said. Then looking at the group of nurses, she added: "Where is Nuova?"
"That's it," said Uno and Due together. "Where is Nuova? She isn't here—she has stopped working."
"Exactly," said Tre. "I thought she would come to that—I've been noticing her lately. She doesn't seem to like to work."
"Whoever heard of such a bee!" exclaimed Uno and Due together.
"Let us find her," said Tre.
So all three started to move around over the comb looking for Nuova. They made wider and wider journeys from the nursery cells, until Uno, who had got down almost to the very bottom of the comb and was quite close to Nuova but had not yet seen her, heard a low voice murmuring, "I am so tired."