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With its mandibles, it scrapes together a small quantity of dust and saturates it with saliva until the whole becomes a regular hydraulic mortar which soon sets and is no longer susceptible to water. The Mason-bees have shown us a similar exploitation of the beaten paths and of the road-mender's macadam.
In vain, adopting the advice given, do I carry my insects first in the opposite direction to the place at which I intend to release them; in vain, when about to retrace my steps, do I twirl my sling with every complication in the way of whirls and twists that I am able to imagine; in vain, thinking to increase the difficulties, do I repeat the rotation as often as five times over: at the start, on the road, on arriving; it makes no difference: the Mason-bees return; and the proportion of returns on the same day fluctuates between thirty and forty per cent.
Let him dismiss any such illusion: more and more journeys are undertaken, now in quest of food, now in quest of mortar; but not one of the Mason-bees troubles about the disastrous breach. The harvester goes on harvesting; the busy bricklayer proceeds with her next row of bricks, as though nothing out of the way had happened.
I mark ten Mason-bees with red, which will enable me to distinguish them from those who returned on the day before and from those who may still return with the white spot uneffaced. The same precautions, the same rotations, the same localities as on the first occasion; only, I make no rotation on the way, confining myself to swinging my box round on leaving and on arriving.
I will first take them to a great distance; then, describing a wide curve, I will return by another road and release my captives when I am near enough to the village, say, about two miles. A conveyance is necessary, this time. My collaborator of the day in the woods offers me the use of his gig. The two of us set off, with fifteen Mason-bees, along the road to Orange, until we come to the viaduct.
They are a page of the book of Nature, opened in the country, under blue sky, displayed at all season." What a marvelous company Van Bruyssel found on his old pear tree; and what inexhaustible worlds did Fabre discover in the lives of the spider, the fly, the caterpillar, the wasps, the mason-bees and others!
Of a column of ten laid in a horizontal tube open at both ends, five made their way to the right and five to the left. "The Mason-bees" by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: passim. Incomplete as it is, this symmetry shows us how unwise it were to generalize from the conclusions to which the Three-pronged Osmia leads us.
In the month of May, so variable, so fickle, in my part of the world, we can hardly ever count on a whole day of fine weather. A splendid morning is swiftly followed by a fitful afternoon; and my experiments with Mason-bees have often suffered by these variations.
These females spend the winter in their cells, as do many of the early-hatching melliferous insects, such as Anthophorae and Mason-bees, who build their nests in the spring, the larvae reaching the perfect state in the summer and yet remaining shut up in their cells until the following May.
What misadventures, what disappointments do these needy creatures suffer, unaccustomed as they are to work! Let me relate some of their misfortunes, gleaned at random. There she finds abundant food, so abundant that she cannot eat it all. I have already passed censure on this waste. "The Mason-bees": chapter 10. This is a manifest error on the parasite's part.
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