However, the inhabitants of this second country were so cruel and tormenting in their dispositions, and the children so teased the bees, which were stingless and could not defend themselves, that they rebelled.  They stopped making honey, and one day they swarmed, and flew in a body across the river in spite of the frantic waving of the ostrich-feather brooms.

The other King was overjoyed.  He ordered beautiful hives to be built for them, and instituted a national festival in their honor, which ever since had been observed regularly on the sixteenth day of May.

Up to this day there were no bees in the kingdom across the river.  Not one would return to where its ancestors had been so hardly treated; here everybody was kind to them, and even paid them honor.  The present King had established an order of the “Golden Bee.”  The Knights of the Golden Bee wore ribbons studded with golden bees on their breasts, and their watchword was a sort of a “buzz-z-z,” like the humming of a bee.  When they were in full regalia they wore also some curious wings made of gold wire and lace.  The Knights of the Golden Bee comprised the finest nobles of the court.

In addition to them were the “Bee Guards.”  They were the King’s own body-guards.  Their uniform was white with green cuffs and collar and facings.  On the green were swarms of embroidered bees.  They carried a banner of green silk worked with bees and roses.

So the bee might fairly have been considered the national emblem of Romalia, for that was the name of the country.  The first word which the children learned to spell in school was “b-e-e, bee,” instead of “b-o-y, boy.”  The poorest citizen had a bush of roses and a bee-hive in his yard, and the people were very forlorn who could not have a bit of honey-comb at least once a day.  The court preferred it to any other food.  Indeed it was this particular Queen who was in the kitchen eating bread and honey, in the song.

[Illustration:  A knight of the golden bee.]

But to return to the Bee Festival, on this especial sixteenth of May.  At sunset when the bees flew back to their hives for the last time with their loads of honey, the court also went home.  They danced along in a splendid merry procession.  The cream-colored ponies the King and Queen rode pranced lightly in advance, their slender hoofs keeping time to the flutes and the bells; and the gallants, leading the ladies by the tips of their dainty fingers, came after them with gay waltzing steps.  The nurses who carried the Princess Rosetta held their heads high, and danced along as bravely as the others, waving their peacock-feather fans in their unoccupied hands.  They bore the little Princess in her basket between them as lightly as a feather.  Up and down she swung.  When they first started she laughed and crowed; then she became very quiet.  The nurses thought she was asleep.  They had laid a little satin coverlet over her, and put a soft thick veil over her face, that the damp evening-air might not give her the croup.  The Princess Rosetta was quite apt to have the croup.