After she had been fed in this way for five days, she was many times larger than she had been at first. At the end of this time, however, the nurse bees did what might seem, at first thought, a rather heartless thing. They made a thin cap or cover of wax over the open mouth of Nuova's cell, thus shutting her up tight in her bedroom. She was so large that she almost filled her cell, but there was still a little room left, and this the nurses filled, just before putting the waxen cap on the cell, with pollen and nectar mixed. For a few days Nuova lay quietly in her dark, sealed-up cell, eating, when hungry, from the lump of pollen and nectar which lay by her side. And then she stopped eating and simply lay there in a sort of trance for several days more. To Nuova herself all her life in the cell, from first day to last, must have seemed little more than a sort of dream; a confused dream of not being able to walk or fly, or see or hear, but only to squirm a little, and be hungry and then be fed, and to feel dimly strange growing pains from the rapidly growing legs and wings when they began to come, and of always being rather comfortably warm and sleepy. But this sleeping time had come to an end now; this helpless pollywog stage was finished for Nuova. And the light she saw through the big eyes that had grown out on her head, during the last few days in the shut-up cell, was the faint but real light of a new day filtering its way through the crowded hive. And the sounds she heard by means of the many tiny little hearing organs on the long, delicate, sensitive feelers, or antennæ, that had also grown out near her eyes and were connected by fine nerves with her brain, were the humming and murmuring of the thousands of industrious bees of the hive who were already at work at their various duties all around her. Nuova's awaking, then, was much more than the mere waking-up after a night's sleeping. It was the waking from a life of doing nothing but lying in bed and sleeping and eating and growing, to a life of taking care of one's self and helping to take care of others; it was the waking from a baby life to real bee life. For Nuova was now a full-grown bee, with all the wonderful body and all the wonderful instincts and the high intelligence that we know bees to have. But she was still shut up in her nursery cell. [Illustration: The beginning of a new life for Nuova]