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The Processionaries, with their unsophisticated traffic-laws, are very different from the Mason-bees and others, who have a special sense to guide them. The Amazon, though belonging to the Hymenopteron clan, herself possesses rather limited homing-faculties, as witness her compulsory return by her former trail.

I start with two Mason-bees of the Walls working at their nests on the pebbles in the alluvia of the Aygues, not far from Serignan. I carry them home with me to Orange, where I release them after marking them. According to the ordnance-survey map, the distance is about two and a half miles as the crow flies.

I must take leave of you for to-day. The ranks are thinning around me and the long hopes have fled. Shall I be able to speak to you again? "The Mason-bees": chapter 7. "Social Life in the Insect World" by J.H. Fabre, translated by Bernard Miall: chapter 14.

There are some whence the perfect insect was never able to issue: the Chalicodoma wore herself out in trying to pierce the ceiling of her chamber; her strength failed her and she perished in the attempt. "The Mason-bees": chapter 11.

I see Anthidia laboriously provide numerous bales of cotton to stop galleries wherein never an egg was laid; I see Mason-bees build and then religiously close cells that will remain unvictualled and uncolonized. The long and useless barricades then belong to the last hours of the Megachile's life, when the eggs are all laid; the mother, whose ovaries are exhausted, persists in building.

Exposed to the icy winds of a Lombard winter, to the fierce fire of a Lombard summer, and to the moist vapours of a Lombard autumn; neglected by unheeding generations; with flowers clustering in their crannies, and birds nesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network of their traceries they still present angles as sharp as when they were but finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the first months of their building.

The mess of honey amassed by the Anthophora will thus pass through the hands of three owners and remain finally the property of the weakest of the three. The Mason-bees: chaps. viii. and ix.

On the 2nd of May 1880, I make a white mark on the thorax of ten Mason-bees busied with various tasks: some are exploring the slabs of clay in order to select a site; others are brick-laying; others are garnering stores. When the mark is dry, I catch them and pack them as I have described. I first carry them a quarter of a mile in the opposite direction to the one which I intend to take.

Besides the common honey-bee there are many other species here fine mossy, burly fellows, who were nourished on the mountains thousands of sunny seasons before the advent of the domestic species. Among these are the bumblebees, mason-bees, carpenter-bees, and leaf-cutters.

One thing, above all, had struck the English scientist on reading the first volume of my "Souvenirs entomologiques", namely, the Mason-bees' faculty of knowing the way back to their nests after being carried to great distances from home. What sort of compass do they employ on their return journeys? What sense guides them?