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NUOVA
or THE NEW BEE
A Story for Children
of Five to Fifty by
VERNON KELLOGG
With Songs by
CHARLOTTE KELLOGG
Illustrated by
Milo Winter
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY VERNON KELLOGG AND
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
JEAN
WHO IS FIVE
[Illustration: "Nuova, I love you"]
PREFATORY NOTE
Most of this that I have written about bees is true: what is not, does
not pretend to be. Some of the true part sounds almost like a
description of what human life might in some respects be, if certain
social movements of to-day were followed out to their logical extreme. I
suppose that in this likeness lies the moral of the book.
V. K.
CONTENTS
I. Nuova Appears 1
II. Nuova's First Experiences 7
III. Nuova as Nurse 16
IV. Nuova sees Some Other Things Done 29
V. Nuova sees Bee Moth and gets acquainted with Beffa 44
VI. Nuova and Hero, and the Birth of the Princess 60
VII. Nuova goes Outside 78
VIII. Nuova and Hero again, and a Battle 93
IX. Hero and Nuova once more, and the Great Courting Chase 106
X. Nuova in the Beautiful Garden 115
XI. Hero finds Nuova in the Garden 130
XII. The Happy Ending 142
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Nuova, I love you" _Colored Frontispiece_
The beginning of a new life for Nuova 4
Industriously cleaning the floor 12
"I am so tired," replied poor Nuova 26
She would like that kind of work 32
"What?" she cried. "Well, you really are a stupid bee" 42
"The stupid one! The faithless one!" 48
"Drones work? It isn't done, you know" 62
There came slowly forth ... the new Princess 74
"Beffa, you are sad," said Saggia 80
Nuova began to clean his wings 96
Nuova was among the fallen 104
In the Garden 116
Beffa settled down comfortably 128
"The Princess is lost!" 146
THE NAMES OF THE BEES
As all the bees of this story are Italian bees, they all, except one,
have Italian names. And they should really be spoken as the Italians
speak them. Besides, they are prettier that way. Therefore, a list of
them, with the proper way to pronounce them, is given here.
_Nuova_ (noo-o'va)
_Uno_ (oo'no)
_Due_ (doo'ay)
_Tre_ (tray)
_Saggia_ (saj'jia)
_Mela_ (may'la)
_Cera_ (chay'ra)
_Fessa_ (fess'sa)
_Aria_ (ah'ri-a)
_Principessa_ (prin-chee-pess'sa)
_Lotta_ (lawt'ta)
_NUOVA_
CHAPTER I
_Nuova Appears_
Nuova seemed to be gradually awakening. It would have seemed that way to
any one who could have seen her just at this moment, and it seemed that
way to Nuova herself. It was just as if one were in a comfortable, warm
bed, and began to be conscious of a faint light outside and of soft
voices and of other subdued sounds. The light and sounds grow stronger
and louder, until, with a start, one is really awake, and sees that the
light is the sunlight of a beautiful morning coming in at the curtained
window, and recognizes the sounds to be those of the household already
busy with a new day's work.
It was, indeed, an awakening for Nuova; but it was more. It was the
beginning of a new life for her. Until now she had been in a sort of
pollywog stage for a bee--a stage in which she had no legs nor wings,
and in which she could do nothing for herself at all, not even as much
as a pollywog can--and had lain all the time in a long, narrow,
six-walled, waxen cell that was bed and room all in one. That is, we
might say, she had always so far in her life been in bed.
For when she was born in her cell, she was just a tiny white thing,
without wings or legs, blind, and quite helpless. Really about all she
could do was to squirm a little in her horizontal cell, and keep opening
her mouth when she was hungry to let somebody know she must be fed. She
was immediately taken care of, however, by the nurse bees who kept near
the nursery cells all the time except when they had to go to the pantry
cells for more food for the babies. This food was flower nectar and
pollen that had been brought into the hive by the active forager bees
and stored in the pantry cells. The nurses made a sort of very good and
nutritious jelly out of it which made Nuova grow very fast.
After she had been fed in this way for five days, she was many times
larger than she had been at first. At the end of this time, however, the
nurse bees did what might seem, at first thought, a rather heartless
thing. They made a thin cap or cover of wax over the open mouth of
Nuova's cell, thus shutting her up tight in her bedroom. She was so
large that she almost filled her cell, but there was still a little room
left, and this the nurses filled, just before putting the waxen cap on
the cell, with pollen and nectar mixed. For a few days Nuova lay quietly
in her dark, sealed-up cell, eating, when hungry, from the lump of
pollen and nectar which lay by her side. And then she stopped eating and
simply lay there in a sort of trance for several days more.
To Nuova herself all her life in the cell, from first day to last, must
have seemed little more than a sort of dream; a confused dream of not
being able to walk or fly, or see or hear, but only to squirm a little,
and be hungry and then be fed, and to feel dimly strange growing pains
from the rapidly growing legs and wings when they began to come, and of
always being rather comfortably warm and sleepy.
But this sleeping time had come to an end now; this helpless pollywog
stage was finished for Nuova. And the light she saw through the big
eyes that had grown out on her head, during the last few days in the
shut-up cell, was the faint but real light of a new day filtering its
way through the crowded hive. And the sounds she heard by means of the
many tiny little hearing organs on the long, delicate, sensitive
feelers, or antennae, that had also grown out near her eyes and were
connected by fine nerves with her brain, were the humming and murmuring
of the thousands of industrious bees of the hive who were already at
work at their various duties all around her.
Nuova's awaking, then, was much more than the mere waking-up after a
night's sleeping. It was the waking from a life of doing nothing but
lying in bed and sleeping and eating and growing, to a life of taking
care of one's self and helping to take care of others; it was the waking
from a baby life to real bee life. For Nuova was now a full-grown bee,
with all the wonderful body and all the wonderful instincts and the high
intelligence that we know bees to have. But she was still shut up in her
nursery cell.
[Illustration: The beginning of a new life for Nuova]
However, to escape from it was not difficult. She could see that the
faint light came in strongest through the capped end of the cell. The
waxen cap was the thinnest part of the walls of her room, and as Nuova's
head was already lying close to the cap, it was a simple and easy matter
for her to begin biting it away with her two strong, little, trowel-like
teeth. In a few moments she had made a little hole in the cap, and the
light and sounds came in suddenly much brighter and louder than before,
although the light was really not bright at all nor the sounds loud, as
we reckon such things. For the inside of a honeybee's house, the hive,
is always pretty dark, and the sounds the bees make are not all loud,
except occasionally when things are especially exciting and all the bees
are buzzing together at once, or when a princess is about to come from
her nursery cell and both she and the old queen do a lot of
extraordinary trumpeting.
But to Nuova, biting her way out through the thin wax cap of her cell,
having never heard nor seen anything at all through all of her baby
life, things seemed very bright and noisy indeed. This, however,
instead of frightening her, made her only the more anxious to get out
and be a part of this exciting world around her, and so she worked away
as fast as she could, until suddenly the hole was large enough for her
to crawl out. This she did, feeling, we may imagine, rather strange at
using her new legs for the first time, and finding her new wings all
folded up and rather damp and heavy. But out she came and, with a long
breath or two, she started to walk over the uneven surface of the waxen
comb in which her nursery cell was situated. But after only a few steps
she felt tired and limp. Indeed she _was_ limp, for all the outer part
of her body, that was later to be firm and strong, was still rather soft
and damp and weak; her legs could not hold her up well yet, and her
unexercised muscles needed a little practice to work together just
right. So she soon stopped, trembling all over from her unwonted
exertion, and let her big eyes gradually take in the strange sight about
her.