281 



NOTES ON NATURAL HISTORY BOOKS. 

 No. L— Insect Architecture. 



Insect Architecture, Insect Transformations, and Insect Miscel- 

 lanies (all published in the Library of Entertaining Knowledge), 

 are books too well known to the public to require a lengthy general 

 criticism of their merits. Suffice it, then, to say that they may be 

 regarded as excellent works, containing many original discoveries, 

 shrewd explanations, masterly refutations of errors, and powerful 

 overthrows of false theories, and evincing, in almost every page, 

 very great literary research, considerable judgment in the selection of 

 facts from former works, and much ingenuity in the arrangement 

 of them. They are just the works to be first read by persons desi- 

 rous of commencing the study of Entomology, and they may be con- 

 sulted with profit even by those who are proficients. Somewhat 

 similar opinions of these works have been expressed by some of the 

 most competent j udges. 



Mason Bee (Anthophora retusaj, p. 33. — " On the north-east 

 wall of Greenwich Park, facing the road, and about four feet from 

 the ground, we discovered, Dec. 10, 1828, the nest of a Mason Bee, 

 formed in the perpendicular line of cement between two bricks. 

 Externally there was an irregular cake of dry mud, precisely as if 

 a handful of wet road-stuff had been taken from a cart-rut and 

 thrown against the wall ; though, upon closer inspection, the cake 

 contained more small stones than usually occur in the mud of the 

 adjacent cart-ruts." 



This species of Bee is also said to build a mud-hive against the 

 side of a tree or bank ; but a writer in the Entomological Maga- 

 zine (iii., 313) says he has known many instances of there being 

 " no external building whatever, the Bees entering the face of the 

 bank by perfectly round smooth holes. Another kind of Bee, 

 Melecla, was [in one instance, at Birch Wood] continually arriving 

 with the Anthophorse, and entering their holes ; it appeared to be 

 on a perfectly friendly footing with the rest of the community. 

 It is the economy of this Bee to lay its eggs in the nest of the An- 

 thophora ; the grubs, on hatching, devour the food provided by the 

 Anthophorse for their own young, which, thus deprived of their 

 support, shrivel up and die. 



Cells of some species of Bee formed in an Elder branch, 

 p. 51. — " That bees of similar habits, if not the same species as the 



VOL. V. NO. XVI II. 2 N 



