"Suppose it's won by a lady bee?" cried a woman's-rights bee in the throng. "She won't want your daughter's hand." "She shall have the hand of my eldest son," replied the Queen bee, with a smile. The reply seemed to satisfy the woman's-right's bee, and the Queen having retired to her royal cell, the crowd broke up, and the various members of it betook their way to their respective hives to cogitate upon the problem presented by the Queen. [Illustration] On the day following the royal proclamation was found posted all over Beeland, in which it was announced that a committee, consisting of the Queen, the Trade Secretary, and the Lord High Treasurer of the country would receive the various plans presented, go over them carefully, and on Christmas day following make known whatever decision they might have reached. This method was satisfactory to all hands, and the bees busied themselves for ten and fifteen hours a day thinking up schemes. It was a long time to think, but bees have very small heads, and they had to think quite as much as that daily to reach any conclusion at all. Some of them got very sick with brain-fever from trying to think too much, and one little worker went crazy because he was so foolish as to cogitate for forty-nine hours without rest. Many of the lighter-headed bees soon gave it up, but the wiser ones, thinking moderately and not too deeply all at once, soon had their schemes mapped out and placed in the committee's hands, or antennæ. The autumn went rapidly. Christmas came, and the committee examined the plans that were presented. "I must say," the Queen said, with a sigh, after reading a large number of foolish schemes, "it doesn't seem to me that my subjects are as bright as they might be. The idea of this fellow suggesting that we go into the 'horse-bothering business'!" The Trade Secretary laughed. "What on earth is the 'horse-bothering business'?" he asked. "He wants individual bees to hire themselves out to farmers with slow horses," said the Queen. "Their duty is to bother the horses until they get skittish and try to run." "Hoh!" laughed the Lord High Treasurer; "what a donkey that bee must be!" "Here's another," observed the Trade Secretary, opening a sealed envelope. "He wants us to go into the carrier-pigeon business. He says there is nothing can strike a bee-line so accurately as a bee, and adds that he thinks a whole swarm ought to be able to earn from fifteen to twenty dollars a month at it."