"Can you blame 'em, father?" said a second voice. "It's rotten with Wax-moth. See here!"Another frame came up. A finger poked through it, and it broke away in rustling flakes of ashy rottenness.
"Number Four Frame! That was your mother's pet comb once,"whispered Melissa to the Princess. "Many's the good egg I've watched her lay there.""Aren't you confusing pod hoc with propter hoc?" said the Bee Master. "Wax-moth only succeed when weak bees let them in." Athird frame crackled and rose into the light. "All this is full of laying workers' brood. That never happens till the stock's weakened. Phew!"He beat it on his knee like a tambourine, and it also crumbled to pieces.
The little swarm shivered as they watched the dwarf drone-grubs squirm feebly on the grass. Many sound bees had nursed on that frame, well knowing their work was useless; but the actual sight of even useless work destroyed disheartens a good worker.
"No, they have some recuperative power left," said the second voice. "Here's a Queen cell!""But it's tucked away among--What on earth has come to the little wretches? They seem to have lost the instinct of cell-building."The father held up the frame where the bees had experimented in circular cell-work. It looked like the pitted head, of a decaying toadstool.
"Not altogether," the son corrected. "There's one line, at least, of perfectly good cells.""My work," said Sacharissa to herself. "I'm glad Man does me justice before--"That frame, too, was smashed out and thrown atop of the others and the foul earwiggy quilts.
As frame after frame followed it, the swarm beheld the upheaval, exposure, and destruction of all that had been well or ill done in every cranny of their Hive for generations past. There was black comb so old that they had forgotten where it hung; orange, buff, and ochre-varnished store-comb, built as bees were used to build before the days of artificial foundations; and there was a little, white, frail new work. There were sheets on sheets of level, even brood-comb that had held in its time unnumbered thousands of unnamed workers; patches of obsolete drone-comb, broad and high-shouldered, showing to what marks the male grub was expected to grow; and two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work, awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose, weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish and capped with dirt.
Good or bad, every inch of it was so riddled by the tunnels of the Wax-moth that it broke in clouds of dust as it was flung on the heap.
"Oh, see!" cried Sacharissa. "The Great Burning that Our Queen foretold. Who can bear to look?"A flame crawled up the pile of rubbish, and they smelt singeing wax.
The Figures stooped, lifted the Hive and shook it upside down over the pyre. A cascade of Oddities, chips of broken comb, scale, fluff, and grubs slid out, crackled, sizzled, popped a little, and then the flames roared up and consumed all that fuel.
"We must disinfect," said a Voice. "Get me a sulphur-candle, please."The shell of the Hive was returned to its place, a light was set in its sticky emptiness, tier by tier the Figures built it up, closed the entrance, and went away. The swarm watched the light leaking through the cracks all the long night. At dawn one Wax-moth came by, fluttering impudently.
"There has been a miscalculation about the New Day, my dears,"she began; "one can't expect people to be perfect all at once.
That was our mistake."
"No, the mistake was entirely ours," said the Princess.
"Pardon me," said the Wax-moth. "When you think of the enormous upheaval--call it good or bad--which our influence brought about, you will admit that we, and we alone--""You?" said the Princess. "Our stock was not strong. So you came--as any other disease might have come. Hang close, all my people."When the sun rose, Veiled Figures came down, and saw their swarm at the bough's end waiting patiently within sight of the old Hive--a handful, but prepared to go on.
