The Busy Bee. 203 



girls on a low diet to make New Women out of them. 

 It is an experiment worth trying on somebody else's 

 little girl. Not mine. Not mine. 



What marvelous, what miraculous transformations 

 occur in the progress from that tiny pearly egg, covered 

 with a fine net like the stuff the women folks call 

 " blonde "; through the blind and legless grub that soaks 

 its food in as well as eats it; through the chrysalis that 

 lies tranced while the swellings on its shoulders change 

 into a double pair of gauzy wings and that ridge upon its 

 breast is metamorphosed into an ingenious tongue, while 

 the interior organs undergo profound mutations, each 

 step of which traces back through millions upon millions 

 of contributing ancestors- 



Ah! we are too ignorant, too dull, and stupid to under- 

 stand! 



But of one thing in this preliminary life I should like 

 to tell, if I might. All of us, from the fishworm to man, 

 are tubes. The white of the egg from which we came 

 pits at either end toward the central yolk, which leaves a 

 hollow that becomes the alimentary tract. Now, the bee 

 is the cleanest of mortals. We say, " As neat as wax," 

 and that is what a beehive is. How to keep it so when 

 there are helpless babies in the brood-comb is a problem 

 solved in a most original manner. In the bee-egg only 

 the front dimple imperforates into the yolk and the bee- 

 grub has only a mouth. It eats, but its dejectamenta re- 

 main impacted in the bowel until the time comes for the 

 transformation sleep. The grub slowly turns end for end 

 in its narrow house until its head is toward the back wall. 

 Then it casts up its interior skin, with all its contents, 

 and rams it into the pit formed by the three rhombs. 

 When its outer coat slips off it, too, is rammed on top the 

 inner skin till all is sealed up air-tight and devoid of 



