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Guided by these considerations, I embarked on the experiments which I will now describe. I have said how my study became a populous hive, in which the Three-horned Osmia built her nests in the various appliances which I had prepared for her. Among these appliances, tubes, either of glass or reed, predominated. There were tubes of all lengths and widths.
At first you wonder if the Indians could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh for that. They are similar to those found in rivers; but as there are no suckers or lampreys here, I know not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin.
The meadow might have been called a plovery as we say rookery and heronry for the green plovers or peewits always had several nests in it. The course of the humble bees that went by could be watched for some way their large size and darker colour made them visible as they now went down into the grass, and now started forward again.
When you find one nest of the Crackle you are pretty certain to find several other occupied nests in the immediate vicinity. From three to six of these marvellous cradles, with their quiet brown female owners, often appear to be watched over by one shining, iridescent lord Crackle, who may be husband to them all. He guards his own with jealous care.
Happily, he had discovered in the factory and he studied as much as he could without magnifying glass or spectacles a small bee which forms its cells among the worm-holes of the wood, and a "sphex" that lays its eggs in cells that are not its own, as the cuckoo in the nests of other birds.
The crow was comparatively inexperienced, or he would have known enough to keep away from the nests of the king-birds. But there it was, in plain sight; and he loved eggs or tender nestlings. Before he had had time to find out which it was that the nest contained, both the parent birds had fallen upon him with a swift ferocity which speedily took away his appetite for food or fight.
Its strength gave out now, and it died there and lay hidden in the lowest nest of the house, till years after I came by and broke open the old stub and made it tell me a sad and mournful story that maybe never happened at all. But there's the drawing I made of it at the place, showing all the nests just as I found them, and there's the dried up body of the little Shrew."
I had not heard the wren; and indeed the birds seemed unusually silent, the squirrels appeared to be asleep in their nests, and not a leaf was stirring. Wordsworth's admonition came into my mind: "Move along these shades In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand Touch for there is a spirit in the woods."
The birds were singing nursery lullabies over their nests in the Coombe Woods, and even the sleek donkeys, dragging up some invalids from the Parade in their trim little chairs, seemed to toil more willingly in the sweet spring sunshine.
We may see the tent-like hills of the white ants, raised high above the surface, and the nests of many other kinds, hanging from high branches, and looking as though they had been constructed out of raw silk and pasteboard.
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