"Does she so?" Melissa backed out of the next bell with a jerk.
"Suppose now, we sound workers tried to raise a Princess in some
clean corner?"

"You'd be put to it to find one. The Hive's all Wax-moth and
muckings. But--well?"

"A Princess might help us in the time of the Voice behind the
Veil that the Queen talks of. And anything is better than working
for Oddities that chirrup about work that they can't do, and
waste what we bring home."

"Who cares?" said Sacharissa. "I'm with you, for the fun of it.
The Oddities would ball us to death, if they knew. Come home, and
we'll begin."

There is no room to tell how the experienced Melissa found a
far-off frame so messed and mishandled by abandoned cell-building
experiments that, for very shame, the bees never went there. How
in that ruin she blocked out a Royal Cell of sound wax, but
disguised by rubbish till it looked like a kopje among deserted
kopjes. How she prevailed upon the hopeless Queen to make one
last effort and lay a worthy egg. How the Queen obeyed and died.
How her spent carcass was flung out on the rubbish heap, and how
a multitude of laying sisters went about dropping drone-eggs
where they listed, and said there was no more need of Queens.
How, covered by this confusion, Sacharissa educated certain young
bees to educate certain new-born bees in the almost lost art of
making Royal Jelly. How the nectar for it was won out of hours in