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 came from. The workers clean up everything and the old Queen fills the cells again with eggs that she wants to be Queens and drones and workers and nurses, and maybe scouts, and they go on making more honey and hatching out more bees, until the hive gets so full that the old Queen says they will have to bring out a young Queen and turn the hive over to her, while they go out and start another family.

“The Queen keeps giving orders all the time about what she wants done. She may rule for five or six years. She lays eggs all the time. You couldn’t believe how many eggs—maybe as many as two million. She has only got seven or eight thousand eyes, ’cause she’s a stay-at-home-lady. Right-on-the Job is her first and last name, both all two of them. But she hasn’t any wax pockets, and no brushes, and no pollen baskets. She doesn’t like light, and she doesn’t know how Madonna lily nectar tastes, ’cause all her food is digested for her before she eats it.—If I could work that scheme on hot dogs, you wouldn’t think they were so bad, would you?”

Jamie laughed.

“Go on,” he said.

“Well, the Queen just keeps right on laying eggs all day, maybe all night, for all I know. Anyway, she lays ’em. I tell you, boy, she lays 'em! And every time she lays an egg she says what she wants it to be, and her nurses go right to work to feed the royal jelly to the white nymphs, and bee bread to make more drones, and to make the workers and the nurses, and the scouts, maybe, like I said