bramble,
obtains for her grubs a cylindrical lodging and divides it into floors
by means of partition walls; a third employs the natural channel of a
cut reed; a fourth is a rent-free tenant of the vacant galleries of
some mason bee. Here are the Macrocerae and the Eucerae, whose males are
proudly horned; the Dasypodae, who carry an ample brush of bristles on
their hind legs for a reaping implement; the Andrenae, so manifold in
species; the slender-bellied Halicti [all wild bees]. I omit a host of
others. If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles,
it would muster almost the whole of the honey yielding tribe. A learned
entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Perez, to whom I submit the naming
of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special means of hunting,
to send him so many rarities and even novelties. I am not at all an
experienced and, still less, a zealous hunter, for the insect interests
me much more when engaged in its work than when struck on a pin in a
cabinet. The whole secret of my hunting is reduced to my dense nursery
of thistles and centauries.

By a most fortunate chance, with this populous family of honey gatherers
was allied the whole hunting tribe. The builders' men had distributed
here and there in the harmas great mounds of sand and heaps of stones,
with a view to running up some surrounding walls. The work dragged on
slowly; and the materials found occupants from the first year. The mason
bees had chosen the interstices between the stones as a dormitory where
to pass the night, in serried groups. The powerful eyed lizard, who,
when close pressed, attacks both man and dog, wide mouthed, had selected
a cave wherein to lie in wait for the passing scarab [a dung beetle
also known as the sacred beetle]; the black-eared chat, garbed like a
Dominican, white-frocked with black wings, sat on the top stone,
singing his short rustic lay: his nest, with its sky blue eggs, must be
somewhere in the heap. The little Dominican disappeared with the loads
of stones. I regret him: he would have been a charming neighbor. The
eyed lizard I do not regret at all.

The sand sheltered a different colony. Here, the Bembeces [digger wasps]
were sweeping the threshold of their burrows, flinging a curve of dust
behind them; the Languedocian Sphex was dragging her Ephippigera [a
green grasshopper] by the antennae; a Stizus [a hunting wasp] was
storing her preserves of Cicadellae [froghoppers]. To my sorrow,