60 INSECT TRANSFORMATIONS. 



from the egs;, and have no mother to direct or pro- 

 vide for them. 



We have numerous beautiful instances of this in 

 the solitary bees and wasps, whicli perform indefa- 

 tigable labours in hewing out nests in wood and 

 stone, and building* structures of clay, leaves, cotton, 

 and other materials, as we have elsewhere detailed 

 at length*. But we recently met with an example of 

 this, which we shall briefly notice. A small solitary 

 bee, {Chclostoma j^orisoiruie?) not so large as the 

 domestic fly, and more slender in the body, instead 

 of digging into the ground like its congeners t, 

 bores a hole in a tree about the diameter of a wheat- 

 straw, and, when empty, resembling externally the 

 timber holes of the furniture-beetle {Anobium ]jer- 

 tinax), for which, indeed, we at first mistook them, 

 till we were undeceived by seeing the little bees going* 

 in and out. When the work is completed, however, 

 the hole can only be detected by a practised eye, for 

 it is neatly covered with a substance, the nature of 

 which remains to be discovered. It is a grey semi- 

 transparent membrane, somewhat resembling the 

 slime of a snail when dried ; but whether it is secreted 

 by the bee like wax, or gathered from plants like 

 propolis, we cannot tell. As we had a whole colony 

 of these little wood-boring bees in the stump of a 

 growing poplar jit Lee, we cut out several of the 

 perforations, in order to examine the interior. These 

 we found more than an inch deep, and filled to the 

 brim with a thin whitish honey; but, like those of 

 the larger carpenter-bees of a different genus (X3//0- 

 copa), they were divided by several partitions of the 

 same membranous material. 



The circumstance, however, which induces us to 

 give these details here, relates to the eggs deposited 



♦ See Insect Architecture, pp. 24 — G4, &c. t Ibid. p. 43. 



