re not quite so numerous, there are also plenty of pupae.
I collect them of every shade of colour, from dead-white, the sign of
a recent transformation, to smoky-brown, the mark of an approaching
metamorphosis. Larvae, in small quantities, complete the harvest. They
are in the state of torpor that precedes the appearance of the pupa.

I prepare boxes with a bed of fresh, sifted earth to receive the larvae
and the pupae, which I lodge each in a sort of half-cell formed by the
imprint of my finger. I will await the transformation to decide to which
sex they belong. As for the perfect insects, they are inspected, counted
and at once released.

In the very unlikely supposition that the distribution of the sexes
might vary in different parts of the colony, I make a second excavation,
at a few yards' distance from the other. It supplies me with another
collection both of perfect insects and of pupae and larvae.

When the metamorphosis of the laggards is completed, which does not take
many days, I proceed to take a general census. It gives me two hundred
and fifty Halicti. Well, in this number of Bees, collected in the burrow
before any have emerged, I perceive none, absolutely none but females;
or, to be mathematically accurate, I find just one male, one alone;
and he is so small and feeble that he dies without quite succeeding in
divesting himself of his nymphal bands. This solitary male is certainly
accidental. A female population of two hundred and forty-nine Halicti
implies other males than this abortion, or rather implies none at all. I
therefore eliminate him as an accident of no value and conclude that, in
the Cylindrical Halictus, the July generation consists of females only.

The building-operations start again in the second week of July. The
galleries are restored and lengthened; new cells are fashioned and the
old ones repaired. Follow the provisioning, the laying of the eggs, the
closing of the cells; and, before July is over, there is solitude again.
Let me also say that, during the building-period, not a male appears in
sight, a fact which adds further proof to that already supplied by my
excavations.

With the high temperature of this time of the year, the development of
the larvae makes rapid progress: a month is sufficient for the various
stages of the metamorphosis. On the 24th of August there are once more
signs of life above the burrows of the Cylindrical Halictus, but under
very different conditions.