at supports the
vines are valuable discoveries, providing as they do sumptuous galleries
free of cost. No preliminary work or next to none is required with
these. Indeed, the insect does not even trouble to make a side-opening,
which would enable it to occupy the cavity contained within two nodes;
it prefers the opening at the end cut by man's pruning-knife. If the
next partition be too near to give a chamber of sufficient length, the
Xylocopa destroys it, which is easy work, not to be compared with the
labour of cutting an entrance through the side. In this way, a spacious
gallery, following on the short vestibule made by the pruning-knife, is
obtained with the least possible expenditure of energy.

Guided by what was happening on the trellises, I offered the black Bee
the hospitality of my reed-hives. From the very beginning, the insect
gladly welcomed my advances; each spring, I see it inspect my rows of
cylinders, pick out the best ones and instal itself there. Its work,
reduced to a minimum by my intervention, is limited to the partitions,
the materials for which are obtained by scraping the inner sides of the
reed.

As first-rate joiners, next to the Carpenter-bees come the Lithurgi,
of whom my district possesses two species: L. cornutus, FAB., and L.
chrysurus, BOY. By what aberration of nomenclature was the name of
Lithurgus, a worker in stone, given to insects which work solely
in wood? I have caught the first, the stronger of the two, digging
galleries in a large block of oak that served as an arch for a
stable-door; I have always found the second, who is more widely
distributed, settling in dead wood--mulberry, cherry, almond,
poplar--that was still standing. Her work is exactly the same as the
Xylocopa's, on a smaller scale. A single entrance-hole gives access
to three or four parallel galleries, assembled in a serried group;
and these galleries are subdivided into cells by means of saw-dust
partitions. Following the example of the big Carpenter-bee, Lithurgus
chrysurus knows how to avoid the laborious work of boring, when occasion
offers: I find her cocoons lodged almost as often in old dormitories
as in new ones. She too has the tendency to economize her strength by
turning the work of her predecessors to account. I do not despair of
seeing her adopt the reed if, one day, when I possess a large enough
colony, I decide to try this experiment on her. I will say nothing about
L. cornutus, whom I only once s