ong-continued toil,
she had next to line it with wadding, to gather the fibrous down from
cottony plants and to felt it into bags suitable for the honey-paste?
The hard-working Bee would not be equal to producing all these
refinements. Her mining calls for too great an expenditure of time and
strength to leave her the leisure for luxurious furnishing. Chambers and
corridors, therefore, will remain bare.

The Carpenter-bee gives us the same answer. When with her joiner's
wimble she has patiently bored the beam to a depth of nine inches, would
she be able to cut out and place in position the thousand and one pieces
which the Silky Leaf-cutter employs for her nest? Time would fail her,
even as it would fail a Megachile who, lacking the Capricorn's chamber,
had herself to dig a home in the trunk of the oak. Therefore the
Carpenter-bee, after the tedious work of boring, gets the installation
done in the most summary fashion, simply running up a sawdust partition.

The two things, the laborious business of obtaining a lodging and the
artistic work of furnishing, seem unable to go together. With the
insect as with man, he who builds the house does not furnish it, he who
furnishes it does not build it. To each his share, because of lack of
time. Division of labour, the mother of the arts, makes the workman
excel in his department; one man for the whole work would mean
stagnation, the worker never getting beyond his first crude attempts.
Animal industry is a little like our own: it does not attain its
perfection save with the aid of obscure toilers, who, without knowing
it, prepare the final masterpiece. I see no other reason for this
need of a gratuitous lodging for the Megachile's leafy basket or the
Anthidia's cotton purses. In the case of other artists who handle
delicate things that require protection, I do not hesitate to assume
the existence of a ready-made home. Thus Reaumur tells us of the
Upholsterer-bee, Anthocopa papaveris, who fashions her cells with
poppy-petals. I do not know the flower-cutter, I have never seen her;
but her art tells me plainly enough that she must establish herself in
some gallery wrought by others, as, for instance, in an Earth-worm's
burrow.

We have but to see the nest of a Cotton-bee to convince ourselves that
its builder cannot at the same time be an indefatigable navvy. When and
newly-felted and not yet made sticky with honey, the wadded purse is
by far the most elegant known specimen o