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The Keeper of the Bees

to miss the scent of the Queen when he goes out to love her up. So, if a male came near me, a fat chance I had, all gummed up with horse and dog. That was the whole trouble—my scent wasn’t right. The Bee Master said it was too aggressive. I had been riding Queen and playing with Mom’s dog and when I get into a scuffle with Chum, half the time he’s on top and half the time I am, and I was all smeared up with dog and horse and things like that, things a bee doesn’t like. The Bee Master always said if he had used any judgment himself, it wouldn’t have happened. He always felt bad about it, but I didn’t mind so much. It’s a pretty good thing to know just edsactly what you are getting into and then, if you think you can stand it, why, most likely you can Anyway, I said I would go down before the hives in the east row the way the Bee Master went to fill the watering pans and to watch that there wasn’t any robbing going on and to see if the queens were all happy and laying a few million eggs or so, and I went meandering along, and first thing I knew , out came a big working bee zoomin’ right above my head, and behind it came two or three more, and they were between me and the Master, and I didn’t want to cut through his flowers—he’s just about as particular as anybody God ever made about flowers and I didn’t know edsactly how to get my chance to dust the home plate, ’cause I had only two eyes and each one of them had maybe six thousand on each side of its head.

“Then the Bee Master yells at me and he says: ‘Zigzag!’ And that was all right if he had a-said it in Spanish or