118 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



peculiar economy of these bees, but his narrative has been 

 so pleasantly rendered in English by Kirby and Spence, in 

 their 'Introduction to Entomology' (vol. i. p. 440), that I 

 would, in preference, commend that more accessible work to 

 my readers. It happens, however, rather unfortunately, that 

 the instructive and graceful passage in question refers to a 

 bee that is not known as an inhabitant of Britain, and, more- 

 over, that all the leaf-cutters do not work by the same design, 

 or select the same site for their architecture. The leaf-cutters 

 with whom I enjoy the honour of a personal acquaintance 

 excavate a longitudinal burrow in some decaying post or rail, 

 or in the dead wood of a willow tree : I have most commonly 

 found them in the horizontal rail of an old fence. Reaumur's 

 bee decorated her dwelling with cuttings from the petals of 

 the field poppy, but her English relatives, or at any rate 

 some of them, exhibit a yearning for still more gorgeous 

 ornamentation, and drape their nurseries with the petals of 

 pelargoniums, sometimes even selecting that intense scarlet 

 which is justly regarded as the ne plus ultra of floral colour. 

 The burrow is cylindrical, about the size of a lady's finger, 

 and usually seven or eight inches in length : I measured one 

 last summer at the residence of my friend Mr. Barrett, at 

 East Dulwich, and found it exactly eight inches and a half 

 in length : it contained seven thimble-shaped cells, placed in 

 a row, the convex extremity of one thimble fitting into the 

 concave extremity of the next, and all of them were lined 

 with cuttings of rose-leaves, and the ends of each cell 

 plugged with the same. I observed that for the convex end 

 of each cell perfectly circular pieces were used, while the 

 lining was composed of differently-shaped pieces, and was 

 four layers in thickness : the cells, when I saw them, con- 

 tained bee larvae of a very considerable size ; these, however, 

 never attained maturity, on account of the activity displayed 

 by little fingers in their attempts to learn the life-history of 

 these amusing visitors. It is a pleasant thing to watch the 

 operations of the parent bee when cutting out her upholstery : 

 she settles on the notched edge of a rose-leaf, and, cutting 

 away with her jaws as with a pair of scissars, separates, in 

 an incredibly short space of time, the desired fragment, and, 

 holding it suspended between her legs, wings her way to the 

 future nursery of her young ones.— Edward Newman. 



