An older hornet known as a friend of the queen’s here took up the word.
“It is true, we are a more powerful race, but the bees are a unified nation, and unflinchingly loyal to their people and their state. That is a great source of strength; it makes them irresistible. Not one of them would turn traitor; each without thought of self serves the weal of all.”
The leader scarcely listened.
“My day is coming,” he hissed. “What care I for the wisdom of these bourgeois! I am a brigand and will die a brigand.—But to keep up the battle now would be madness. What good would it do us if we destroyed the whole hive, and none of us came back alive?” Turning to the messenger, he cried:
“Give us back our dead. We will withdraw.”
A dead silence fell. The messenger flew off.
“We must be prepared for a fresh piece of trickery, though I don’t think the hornets are in a fighting mood at present,” said the queen bee when she heard the hornets’ decision. She gave orders for the rear-guard, wax-generators, and honey-carriers to remove the dead from the city while two fresh regiments guarded the entrance.
Her orders were carried out. Over mountains of the dead one brigand’s body after another was dragged to the entrance and thrown to the ground outside.
In gloomy silence the troop of hornets waited on the silver-fir and saw the corpses of their fallen warriors drop one by one to the earth.
The sun arose upon a scene of endless desolation. Twenty-one slain, who had died a glorious death, made a heap in the grass under the city of the bees. Not a drop of honey, not a single prisoner had been taken by the enemy. The hornets picked up their dead and flew away, the battle was over, the bees had conquered.