lly jealous of the maternal inheritance, the Mason-bee
of the Sheds eagerly uses the cells whence her generation issued. The
work in the huge city under the eaves begins thus: the old cells,
of which, by the way, the good-natured owner yields a portion to
Latreille's Osmia and to the Three-horned Osmia alike, are first made
clean and wholesome and cleared of broken plaster and then provisioned
and shut. When all the accessible chambers are occupied, the actual
building begins with a new stratum of cells upon the former edifice,
which becomes more and more massive from year to year.

The Mason-bee of the Shrubs, with her spherical nests hardly larger than
walnuts, puzzled me at first. Does she use the old buildings or does she
abandon them for good? To-day perplexity makes way for certainty: she
uses them very readily. I have several times surprised her lodging
her family in the empty rooms of a nest where she was doubtless born
herself. Like her kinswoman of the Pebbles, she returns to the native
dwelling and fights for its possession. Also, like the dome-builder,
she is an anchorite and prefers to cultivate the lean inheritance alone.
Sometimes, however, the nest is of exceptional size and harbours a crowd
of occupants, who live in peace, each attending to her business, as in
the colossal hives in the sheds. Should the colony be at all numerous
and the estate descend to two or three generations in succession, with a
fresh layer of masonry each year, the normal walnut-sized nest becomes
a ball as large as a man's two fists. I have gathered on a pine-tree
a nest of the Mason-bee of the Shrubs that weighed a kilogram (2.205
pounds avoirdupois.--Translator's Note.) and was the size of a child's
head. A twig hardly thicker than a straw served as its support. The
casual sight of that lump swinging over the spot on which I had sat down
made me think of the mishap that befell Garo. (The hero of La Fontaine's
fable, "Le Gland et la Citrouille," who wondered why acorns grew on such
tall trees and pumpkins on such low vines, until he fell asleep under
one of the latter and a pumpkin dropped upon his nose.--Translator's
Note.) If such nests were plentiful in the trees, any one seeking the
shade would run a serious risk of having his head smashed.

After the Masons, the Carpenters. Among the guild of wood-workers, the
most powerful is the Carpenter-bee (Xylocopa violacea (Cf. "The Life
of the Spider": chapter 1.--Translator's Note.