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The weather is hot and hints at a coming storm. There is a perceptible breeze from the south, but not enough to upset my travellers. Forty Mason-bees are caught. To shorten the preparations, because of the distance, I do not mark them while they are on the nests; I shall mark them at the starting-point, as I release them.
The work of these insects is masonry; only it is turned out by a rustic mason more used to hard clay than to hewn stone. Reaumur, who knew nothing of scientific classification a fact which makes many of his papers very difficult to understand named the worker after her work and called our builders in dried clay Mason-bees, which describes them exactly. Cf.
One more detail not without value: it is not necessary for you to intervene and imprison Mason-bees for a time in order to witness the acts of violence which I have described. If you follow the work of the swarm assiduously, you may occasionally find a surprise awaiting you. A Mason-bee will appear and, for no reason known to you, break open a door and lay her egg in the violated cell.
The Osmiae quarrel for the possession of these crystal palaces, hitherto unknown to their race. The reeds and the paper tubes likewise do wonderfully. The number provided is too small; and I hasten to increase it. "The Mason-bees": chapters 4 and 10. The late-comers, finding nothing else free, go and settle in the locks of my table-drawers.
Reversing the savage Prussian maxim, 'Might is right, among the Mason-bees right is might, for there is no other explanation of the invariable retreat of the usurper, whose strength is not a whit inferior to that of the real owner.
Every May, for five or six years in succession, I have assiduously watched the works of my Mason-bees. From the mass of my notes on the subject I take the following experiments which bear upon the matter under discussion.
Total: nine out of forty, or twenty-two per cent. The proportion is smaller than in the former cases, when it varied between thirty and forty per cent. Must we attribute this result to the difficulties to be overcome? Can the Mason-bees have lost their way in the maze of the forest?
Dearth and the farinaceous mess in the Osmia's cell has had no more influence over species or sex than abundance and flowing honey in the Chalicodoma's home. Cf. "The Mason-bees": chapters 9 and 10. Cf. "Bramble-dwellers and Others": chapters 2 and 3. "The Mason-bees": chapter 11. I know her under two names.
Damp places, which would facilitate the quarrying and reduce the expenditure of saliva for mixing the mortar, are scorned by the Mason-bees, who refuse fresh earth for building even as our own builders refuse plaster and lime that have long lost their setting-properties. These materials, when soaked with pure moisture, would not hold properly.
Dwellings such as these, which need only a little repair to put them in good condition, save a great deal of time and trouble; and the Mason-bees look out for them and do not decide to build new nests except when the old ones are wanting. From one and the same dome there issue several inhabitants, brothers and sisters, ruddy males and black females, all the offspring of the same Bee.
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