round the hive and getting waited on by five or six worker bees and everybody has stood everything from him, why, every one of them gets stung, too. When it happens in the observation hive, you can sit with the glasses on ’em and see their faces, and they look so surprised and scared you can’t help feeling sorry for them. They don’t know what they’ve done, and they don’t know why what’s happening to them happens, and they can’t understand why workers that waited on them, just a whole army of workers, mad as Alice’s March Hare and the Hatter out of Wonderland, come roaring at ’em singing a war song and whooping battle cries. The old Mr. Drones get their wings pulled off and they get their eyes stung out and they get punkshered everywhere, and every last one of them gets killed good and dead, and pushed out of the hive.
“There’s not anybody left but the young Queen and the Maids of Honour and the workers and the nurses that are going to stay with her. If there’s any danger, all of them make a shield and cover up the young Queen. If it is a hard winter, they get close around her to keep her warm; and if there isn’t enough food, they all go hungry and feed her. No matter what happens to them,, every one of them, as long as they are alive, takes care of the Queen, because it is the eggs she lays that make the new brood and keep the bees alive in the world. So something tells every bee, ‘No matter if you die yourself, take care of your Queen so that bees will not vanish off the face of the world like everything did that time of the flood.’ The thing that tells them, that’s God again.”
