We watch beside the cradles
When the bee-babies sleep;
We guard the shining pantries
Where the bee-milk we keep.
And when the countless tiny
Bee-mouths open wide,
We rush with drink and bee-bread
And drop them inside.
Our bread's the daintiest morsel
A wee babe could eat;
We knead it of soft pollen
And flower nectar sweet.
When ends our busy bee-day
The nurseries we right,
Then wash our countless bee-mites
And tuck them in tight.
Just try to feed our family,
And swiftly you'll see
That never were there nurses
So busy as we.
So she started to climb up to them. Just as she had gone a little way up, however, her attention was called to a very active and apparently excited group of bees crowding about a very different sort of cell from the ones that made up all the rest of the comb. This was five or six times as large as any of the others, and not six-sided, but shaped something like a pear with its small end down. It did not lie horizontal in the comb, but vertical, or nearly so, and had a rough, thick wall, and was open at its smaller, lower end. Nuova could not see what was in it, for she was already as high or higher than it was, as it was near the lower edge of the comb, its lower end, indeed, being but a little way above the floor.
As she hesitated a moment, attracted by the sight of the strange cell and the many excited bees about it, most of whom were nurses, she heard a bee, hurrying away from the cell, say to another hurrying toward it:
"How fast the princess is growing!"
This did not enlighten Nuova much, but the feeling inside of her was now so strong that she must begin work at once that she hurried on up to the nursery cells lying a little way above the curious large cell without trying to find out anything about it. Which shows again, of course, how different bees are from us.
When Nuova got to the nursery cells with their hungry babies she went right to work. She seemed to know just what to do; to go to the pollen and honey cells and drink honey and eat pollen and swallow them, but not too far, and then wait a few minutes, and then give this food up again, all properly mixed, through her mouth right into the open mouths of the hungry babies. And she knew just what babies were ready to have their cells capped with wax—with a nice little lump of food stored inside first, of course—and how to call some bee with a pellet of wax in its mouth to do the capping. She understood at once that the shining, silver-yellowish plates on the bodies of the bees in the festoon at the end of the comb were wax, and that the pieces being picked up by other bees from the floor underneath the festoon were to be used for capping cells, and for making new cells where the vertical wall of comb was still incomplete.