The Master, too, had shown much interest in us. On one of the early days of our trouble, in passing, he had discovered our condition.
“They have lost their Queen,” he said to the little Shadow. “You can tell that by their movements. Everything is now in confusion. Let us see whether they have eggs or young larvæ available for the making of a Queen.”
With that he opened our hive and found the queen-cells.
“Here are cells already,” he commented, a gleam of satisfaction on his grave face.
“Let me see!” cried the Shadow, poking a little, curious face around a corner of the hive.
The Master knew at a glance the age of the Queens, for the cells had not been sealed; he knew that on such a day one would come forth amid the acclaim of a colony which had languished between hope and fear—life and death. So now, from day to day, with his little Shadow, he passed, pausing in front of the hive long enough to discover whether the great event had occurred.
It was on a day golden with a sun steeped in the waning glory of an Indian summer that the Queen emerged and took her throne. Crip and I had gone to the lake for a load of water, and we should probably not have missed the event had we not, out of curiosity, returned by the hollow tree which our brothers of the swarm had occupied. We flew up to the very entrance; the workers were filing past in a great stream, humming a note of content.
“They will survive,” I said to Crip. “The season has been a late one, and they must have gathered ample stores.”
We were in jubilant mood, on account of this discovery, which chimed in perfectly with conditions at home, for even before we alighted the sound of rejoicing reached us.