The Tribulations of the Mason-bee 



IS time to abandon for good the house with 

 its cracks and rents. 



Thereupon the crumbling apartments, on 

 the pebble as well as on the tile, become the 

 home of a camp of gypsies, who are not par- 

 ticular where they find a shelter. The shape- 

 less hovel, reduced to a fragment of a wall, 

 finds occupants, for the Mason's work must 

 be exploited to the utmost limits of possi- 

 bility. In the blind alleys, all that remains of 

 the former cells. Spiders weave a white-satin 

 screen, behind which they lie in wait for the 

 passing game. In nooks which they repair 

 in summary fashion with earthen embank- 

 ments or with clay partitions. Hunting-wasps, 

 Pompili and Tripoxyla, store up small mem- 

 bers of the Spider tribe, including sometimes 

 the Weaving-spiders who live inside the same 

 ruins. 



I have said nothing yet of the Chalicodoma 

 of the Shrubs. My silence is not due to negli- 

 gence, but to the circumstance that I am al- 

 most destitute of facts relating to her para- 

 sites. Of the many nests which I have 

 opened In order to study their inhabitants, 

 only one so far has been invaded by strangers. 

 This nest, the size of a large walnut, was 

 273 



