Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/224

 The little Scout looked Jamie straight in the eye.

“You begin to see now, don’t you, why the Bee Master said the hair on a bee was God?”

“Yes,” said Jamie, “I begin to see. It is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard about in all the world! Go on and tell me more. Tell me every least little thing you know.”

“There isn’t much more to tell,” said the little Scout. “There’s more figures I could tell about—how the old drone males have got just oodles more eyes and more smell hollows than the workers. The old drone males have got thirty-seven thousand eight hundred smell hollows and that is so they will be dead sure to find the Queen, and that’s God again. And the old drone males have got thirteen thousand eyes on each side of their heads. That’s so they can see better than anybody else and be certain to find the Queen, ’cause they’ve got to find the Queen, and they’ve got to get married, and the Queen has to lay her eggs to keep the world having bees, and to make the nice, sweet honey for everybody, and to keep the hundred thousand flowers alive.

“When the Bee Master gets the old Queen and her family in a new hive, he sets it up in a nice place. The scouts come back to where they left the Queen and they hunt until they find the new hive. They know their family and they go in, and then everybody goes to work. The workers build the cells, and the old Queen lays all the eggs and tells the workers what she wants to come out of each egg. They go straight ahead just like they did in the hive they