"No, your majesty," answered the Bees, with great reverence; "but we know that you are intending to kill the Princesses, and _that_ you shall not be allowed to do. What would become of us in the autumn after your majesty's death?" "Let me go!" cried the Queen, and tried to get away. "I am Queen now anyway, and have the power to do what I like. How do you know that I shall die in the autumn?" But the Bees held her fast, and dragged her outside the hive. There they set her free, but she shook her wings in a passion and said to them,-- "You are disloyal subjects, who are not worth ruling over. I won't stay here an hour longer, but I will go out into the world and build a new nest. Are there any of you who will come with me?" Some of the old Bees, who had been Grubs at the same time as the Queen, declared that they would follow her. And soon after they flew away. "Now we have no Queen," said the others, "we must take good care of the Princesses." And so they crammed them with honey from morning till night; and they grew, and grabbed, and squabbled, and made more noise each day than the day before. As for the little Grub, no one gave a single thought to her. One morning the doors of the Princesses' chambers flew open, and all ten of them stepped out, beautiful full-grown Queen Bees. The other Bees ran up and gazed at them in admiration. "How pretty they are!" they said. "It is hard to say which is the most beautiful." "_I_ am!" one cried. "You make a mistake," said another, and stabbed her with her sting. "You are rather conceited," shrieked a third. "I imagine that _I_ am rather prettier than you are." And immediately they all began calling out at once, and soon after began to fight with one another as hard as ever they could. The Bees would have liked to separate them, but the old head Bee Nurse said to them,--"Let them go on fighting; then we shall see which of them is the strongest, and we will choose her to be our Queen. We can't do with more than one." At this the Bees formed round in a ring and looked on at the battle. It lasted a long time, and it was fiercely fought. Wings and legs which had been bitten off were flying about in the air, and after some time eight of the Princesses lay dead upon the ground. The two last were still fighting. One of them had lost all her wings, and the other had only four legs left. "She will be a poor sort of Queen whichever of the two we get," said one of the Bees. "We should have done better to have kept the old one." But she might have spared herself the remark, for in the same moment the Princesses gave each other such a stab with their stings that they both fell dead as a door-nail. "That is a pretty business!" called the Bees, and ran about among each other in dismay. "Now we have no Queen! What shall we do? What shall we do?"