Nuova; or, The New BeeKellogg, Vernon L. (Vernon Lyman)
Science
Nuova; or, The New Bee
Kellogg, Vernon L. (Vernon Lyman)
Bees -- Folklore; Bees -- Juvenile fiction
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.
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_!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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