a moment of anger and takes good care not
to hand down any tendency towards idleness to her offspring. She knows
too well that activity is life, that work is the world's great joy. What
myriads of cells has she not broken open since she has been building;
what magnificent opportunities, all so clear and conclusive, has she
not had to emancipate herself from drudgery! Nothing could convince her:
born to work, she persists in an industrious life. She might at least
have produced an offshoot, a race of housebreakers, who would invade
cells by demolishing doors. The Stelis does something of the kind; but
who would think of proclaiming a relationship between the Chalicodoma
and her? The two have nothing in common. I call for a scion of the
Mason-bee of the Sheds who shall live by the art of breaking through
ceilings. Until they show me one, the theorists will only make me smile
when they talk to me of erstwhile workers relinquishing their trade to
become parasitic sluggards.

I also call, with no less insistence, for a descendant of the
Three-horned Osmia, a descendant given to demolishing party-walls. I
will describe later how I managed to make a whole swarm of these Osmiae
build their nests on the table in my study, in glass tubes that enabled
me to see the inmost secrets of the work of the Bee. (Cf. "Bramble-bees
and Others", by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de
Mattos: chapters 1 to 7.--Translator's Note.) For three or four weeks,
each Osmia is scrupulously faithful to her tube, which is laboriously
filled with a set of chambers divided by earthen partitions. Marks of
different colours painted on the thorax of the workers enable me
to recognize individuals in the crowd. Each crystal gallery is the
exclusive property of one Osmia; no other enters it, builds in it or
hoards in it. If, through heedlessness, through momentary forgetfulness
of her own house in the tumult of the city, some neighbour so much as
comes and looks in at the door, the owner soon puts her to flight. No
such indiscretion is tolerated. Every Bee has her home and every home
its Bee.

All goes well until just before the end of the work. The tubes are then
closed at the orifice with a thick plug of earth; nearly the whole swarm
has disappeared; there remain on the spot a score of tatterdemalions in
threadbare fleeces, worn out by a month's hard toil. These laggards have
not finished their laying. There is no lack of unoccupied tubes, fo