"Good
Housekeeping" and the "Youth's Companion"; others now see the light in
English for the first time.

I have again to thank Miss Frances Rodwell for the invaluable assistance
which she has given me in the work of translation and in the less
interesting and more tedious department of research.

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.

Chelsea, 1914.

CONTENTS.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

CHAPTER 1. THE MASON-BEES.

CHAPTER 2. EXPERIMENTS.

CHAPTER 3. EXCHANGING THE NESTS.

CHAPTER 4. MORE ENQUIRIES INTO MASON-BEES.

CHAPTER 5. THE STORY OF MY CATS.

CHAPTER 6. THE RED ANTS.

CHAPTER 7. SOME REFLECTIONS UPON INSECT PSYCHOLOGY.

CHAPTER 8. PARASITES.

CHAPTER 9. THE THEORY OF PARASITISM.

CHAPTER 10. THE TRIBULATIONS OF THE MASON-BEE.

CHAPTER 11. THE LEUCOPSES.

INDEX.

CHAPTER 1. THE MASON-BEES.

Reaumur (Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur (1683-1757), inventor of the
Reaumur thermometer and author of "Memoires pour servir a l'histoire
naturelle des insectes."--Translator's Note.) devoted one of his
papers to the story of the Chalicodoma of the Walls, whom he calls
the Mason-bee. I propose to go on with the story, to complete it and
especially to consider it from a point of view wholly neglected by that
eminent observer. And, first of all, I am tempted to tell how I made
this Bee's acquaintance.

It was when I first began to teach, about 1843. I had left the normal
school at Vaucluse some months before, with my diploma and all the
simple enthusiasm of my eighteen years, and had been sent to Carpentras,
there to manage the primary school attached to the college. It was
a strange school, upon my word, notwithstanding its pompous title of
'upper'; a sort of huge cellar oozing with the perpetual damp engendered
by a well backing on it in the street outside. For light there was the
open door, when the weather permitted, and a narrow prison-window, with
iron bars and lozenge panes set in lead. By way of benches there was a
plank fastened to the wall all round the room, while in the middle was a
chair bereft of its straw, a black-board and a stick of chalk.

Morning and evening, at the sound of the bell, there came rushing in
some fifty young imps who, having shown themselves hopeless dunces with
their Cornelius Nepos, had been relegated, in the phrase of the day,
to 'a few good years of French.' Those who had found mensa too much for
them came to me to get a smattering of grammar. Children and strap