s neatly together. In
the bottom of the tunnel she puts some pollen paste, lays an egg on the
paste, cuts some circular pieces of rose leaf, which she presses on the
top of the egg and pollen, forming a green roof for the room and a floor
for the room above. She puts in more food and another egg, until the
tunnel is full of little rooms."

"And what does the carpenter-bee do?" asked Jack, looking with new
respect at the bit of honeycomb he held in his hand.

"She makes doors of pith, and, like the tender mother she is, sits on
top of the nest waiting for her babies to grow up. This is a most
unusual thing for a bee mother to do. The egg at the very bottom of the
tube hatches first, but it has to wait until the others hatch.
By-and-by Mrs. Carpenter-Bee takes them all out for a sunny flight in
the summer air."

"And they never come back any more!" sang out Peter.

"Indeed they do, you care-free youngster. The pith doors have been taken
down, and they come back to put things in order. They clean house; they
bring out every scrap piece by piece. There is a big carpenter-bee that
makes its doors of chips of wood, usually neatly glued together. There
is just one lazy bee in the world of which I know, and that is a
visiting-bee."

"Visiting-bees?"

"Yes, the guest-bees, who visit their friends the year round, let their
hosts wait upon them, and never help to keep anything clean or to
collect nectar and pollen. Mrs. Guest-Bee even lays her eggs in Mrs.
Bumblebee's nest, and when the guest babies hatch out, it is not their
mother, but Mrs. Bumblebee, who feeds them from the food she has stored
up for her own children. The guest-bees are so lazy that no little
baskets are found on their legs for carrying pollen."

"But aren't the bees ever idle?" asked Peter, whose conscience hurt him
because he never liked to work.

"No bee except the guest-bee and drone is ever idle. The happy-go-lucky
bumblebee, which buzzes so near us on these warm summer days, is always
on the go, although she is easy-going and happy-go-lucky. Mrs. Bumblebee
isn't an over-particular person, as bee persons go. She is not a careful
housekeeper, like her cousin Mrs. Honey-Bee, but she carries her own
burdens just the same, and probably is as contented in her roughly made,
untidy house as Mrs. Honey-Bee is in her beautifully neat one. Sometimes
she has a nest as big as your head, with rooms in it of all sizes and
shapes. She probably thinks the honey-