WHAT THE BEE WANTED OF ELSIE’S NOSE
“Yes, it may seem funny, but
it is natural. When you were asleep you heard
the bee buzzing and rumbling, and the sound reminded
you of an engine, so you began to picture an engine
in your mind, and with the queer mixture of fact and
fancy that are common to dreams you thought it was
coming right at you. And it was only a bumble-bee
taking a look at your little red-and-white nose.”
Elsie clapped her hands and laughed. Then she
asked:
“What did the bee want to see my nose for, mamma?”
“He thought, perhaps, that it
was some new kind of a bud, and he wished to examine
it,” Mrs. Edson smiled. “A little
girl’s face is very much like a pretty flower.
Your hair was tumbled all about your head, I suppose,
and your little rosebud of a nose, peeking through,
attracted the bee.”
At this idea Elsie laughed again, joyously.
“But, mamma,” she asked,
“why should the bee wish to see my nose, even
if he did think it might be a flower? Do bees
eat flowers, mamma?”
Elsie’s mother threw her a sudden
look that was almost a startled one. Then she
hugged her close and kissed her.
“What a great big little girl
you are getting to be, darling!” she said, gazing
fondly at her. This did not seem to Elsie much
like an answer to her question, and she fixed her
eyes brightly on her mother’s face as if waiting
for her to go on with her words. But her mother
only said: “I scarcely realized that you
were no longer my little baby-girl, and that you were
instead almost a young lady, old enough to understand
many new things, among them the reason why a bee goes
to flowers.”
She paused again, looking at her big
little girl wistfully. She was thinking:
“Elsie has begun to be a woman now, and I shall
soon, all too soon, lose my baby-girl, for she will
grow up and marry and go away to a home of her own
and have a little girl like herself, just as I have
had her!”
This made her feel sad, but she said
nothing to Elsie of this feeling, for she would not
be able to understand it and it would only make her
feel sad too. By and by she would tell her what
it meant to have a husband and children and home of
her own, after her parents were passed away, and she
must begin to prepare her for this knowledge now.
So, finally, she said:
“No, darling, bees do not eat
flowers, though they eat a part of them, or a product
of them. The most important thing that they visit
flowers for, as far as the world is concerned, is
to fertilize them.”
“Fer-fer-ilize!”
stammered Elsie. “What is that, mamma?”
“Not ferferilize, darling, but
fertilize, fer-til-ize, which means to make rich,
or fruitful. As strange as it may seem the bees
and other insects are of vast importance to men sh-h!”
She suddenly held up her hand, motioning
for silence, and Elsie, wondering what was coming,
followed her mother’s pointing finger with her
eyes. What she saw was a bee hovering over a bright
yellow buttercup that grew almost within reach of
where she sat.
“Watch him!” whispered her mother.
Elsie did so, holding her breath for
fear of scaring him away. He alighted on the
flower, crawled clumsily over it for a second or two,
pausing now and then to bury his head in the blossom,
but he did not do anything else, that Elsie could
see, except to tumble about very awkwardly and funnily
and then fly away to another buttercup and repeat
the operation. Elsie drew a long breath and looked
at her mother inquiringly.
“It did not seem as if he did
much, did it, dearie!” she said in answer to
the look. “But in reality he did a great
deal, for he what shall I say married?
Yes, married! The bee actually married those two
buttercups together, so that next season, when these
two flowers, the papa and mamma, are dead and gone,
there will spring up and grow other buttercups, baby-plants,
the children of these two. If it were not for
the bee, or other insects, we should have no bright
flowers in the world.”
“Oh!” Elsie’s eyes
opened wide. She thought a moment, then, “Could
he marry my nose to anything?” she burst forth.
But seeing the absurdity of the notion before the
words were fairly out of her mouth she joined in her
mother’s laughter over it.
“No, dearie, of course not.
It is only flowers that bees marry together.
And not the least strange thing about it is that they
do not know they are doing so.”
“Don’t know what they are doing!”
exclaimed Elsie.
“Oh, yes, they know what they
are doing for themselves, but they can’t have
the least notion of what they are doing for the flowers
and indeed for the whole world! Without plants
there could be no life of any kind on earth.
It is the plants that produce life. Through them
come animals, and even men and women and little girls.
The plants feed on the earth and air, which men and
animals cannot do. A man or a lamb cannot eat
the soil or live on air, but a plant lives by eating
the minerals and gases and water of the earth and
air, and the man and the lamb eat the plants, and
so are able to live. Without the plants we could
not exist, and without the insects, which fertilize
the plants, so that they can grow, the plants themselves
would soon die. Don’t you think now that
what the bee did was quite an important matter, even
if it did seem so trivial?”
“Ye-yes,” Elsie hesitated.
She did not yet grasp the full depth of her mother’s
words. They meant so much! “But,”
she continued, her bright eyes eagerly turned on her
mother’s face, “we don’t eat the
buttercup, mamma, do we?”
“No, sweetie, but we do eat
very gladly a part of it, and that is the part that
the bee visited the flower for, and which he took away
as his fee for marrying the two. Can you guess
what it is?”
The idea of a bee performing a marriage
between flowers and taking a fee for it was a little
too much for Elsie, and when it was added that she
and her mother ate this fee such a look of amazement
came into her sweet face that her mother could not
help smiling broadly.
“It is the honey, little girlie,”
she said. “The bee takes the honey from
the flower and carries it home to the hive, where he
stores it up until he has a great mass of it, and
then the bee-man gets it and sells it to the grocer,
who sells it to us.”
“W-e-l-l!” said Elsie
slowly, “if that isn’t strange!”
She sat a moment thinking of this miracle, her mother
watching her lovingly and considering what she ought
to say next, for she had a great secret to tell her
little daughter, a secret so great and important that
much wise thought was required to study out just how
to make it plain to a girl as young as Elsie.
Besides, she was interested to know what Elsie herself
would say next, for she was bringing her up to think
logically, so that she might know always how to ask
the right question at the right time, instead of the
wrong one. And she was very much pleased when
Elsie, instead of putting the last question first,
as some little girls would have done, put the right
one first by saying:
“But, mamma, how can
flowers marry! And how can a bee possibly marry
them?”
This was the right question to ask
first, even if it was a kind of double-headed one,
because this marriage was the first of the wonders
that had amazed her, and the answer to it would lead
logically to the fee and the honey eaten by people,
and these questions would be easier to make plain
after the first one was answered.