owed to carry
out her nefarious designs without the slightest interference or protest
from any of her neighbours, though these must necessarily include the
chief party interested. The Bee is as forgetful of her cell of yesterday
as she is jealous of her actual cell. To her the present is everything;
the past means nothing; and the future means no more. And so the
population of the tile leave the breakers of doors to do their business
in peace; none hastens to the defence of a home that might well be her
own. How differently things would happen if the cell were still on the
stocks! But it dates back to yesterday, to the day before; and no one
gives it another thought.

It's done: the lid is demolished; access is free. For some time, the Bee
stands bending over the cell, her head half-buried in it, as though in
contemplation. She goes away, she returns undecidedly; at last she makes
up her mind. The egg is snapped up from the surface of the honey and
flung on the rubbish-heap with no more ceremony than if the Bee were
ridding the house of a bit of dirt. I have witnessed this hideous crime
again and yet again; I confess to having repeatedly provoked it. In
housing her egg, the Mason-bee displays a brutal indifference to the
fate of her neighbour's egg.

I see some of them afterwards busy provisioning, disgorging honey and
brushing pollen into the cell already completely provisioned; I see some
masoning a little at the orifice, or at least laying on a few trowels of
mortar. It seems as if the Bee, although the victuals and the building
are just as they should be, were resuming the work at the point at which
she left it twenty-four hours before. Lastly, the egg is laid and the
opening closed up. Of my captives, one, less patient than the rest,
rejects the slow process of eating away the cover and decides in favour
of robbery with violence, on the principle that might is right. She
dislodges the owner of a half-stocked cell, keeps good watch for a
long time on the threshold of the home and, when she feels herself
the mistress of the house, goes on with the provisioning. I follow the
ousted proprietress with my eyes. I see her seize upon a closed cell
by breaking into it, behaving in all respects like my imprisoned
Chalicodomae.

The whole occurrence was too significant to be left without further
confirmation. I repeated the experiment, therefore, almost every year,
always with the same success. I can only add that, among t