And in one corner sat the sleeping Queen.
"Shoosh", I to me. "She needs her sleep."
She yawned and opened 1 big black peeper.
"Sorry to wake you. You're such a light sleeper!"
"What's all this?"
"Just re-decorating."
"Well wake me when you're done," said the bug lady.
And hearing her voice, returned all the workers.
"I'm now the boss. There will be no shirkers!"
"Lift that bale. Tote that barge.
I'm the lady that's now in charge."
"We're going to build in the modern mode -
Under the noses of those lounging drones -
Where form follows blueprint,
And function comes later,
And on top a penthouse
For our dear sleeping 'mater'".
And they molded bricks out of the wax,
And nouveau looking smoking glass,
And door knobs and hinges and places to linger
Where a worker could rest her aching stinger;
Sculptured gargoyles around the rain spouts,
And a bell tower and a lookout,
And 13 gables, 6 more than the book,
And a late-night, can't-sleep, coffee nook.
And it grew and grew like that Babel Tower
Until the clouds almost tipped it over.
But before that happened a tragedy :
It began to melt from the Sun's heat!
The little girl was shining a brass plate
That announced the builder and the building date.
"It's the last thing that one must do
Before the building can be said to be through."
But then a bee like Paul Revere,
Buzzed the alarm, "It's melting up there!"
And when the girl looked, it was true.
The top of the tower was turning to goo!
And down ran the wax so avant garde,
In little running twisting rods
That rolled and curled all over the top
Until they'd melted 2 stories and stopped.
The bees kept sobbing but the girl declined.
She said to all, "I like the design.
It's just the thing, the 'je ne sai qua'."
And the bees looked again and yelled, "Hoo-raa!"
And the Queen heard the noise and woke up with a start
To not the old hive but a wax work of art.
And she liked it and said, "Now it needs naming...
I dub it the tower 'Waxing and Reigning."
The end.