BURROWING AND CARPENTER BEESJ 



female, linger among the astersand golden-rods in mid- 

 September. 



A naturalist, in his narrower field, continually falls 

 upon experiences like that of Columbus, who, while 

 searching for the Indies, found a new world. For a 

 year the vicinage of Brookcamp had been vainly ex- 

 plored for a settlement of burrowing bees. One mid- 

 April morning (1906), while passing, on another errand, 

 a fallow field hard by our very gate, lo, the flutter of 

 wings above the withered grass, and there lay the object 

 of our long search! 



On the low bank of the roadside rose a crowded " neigh- 

 borhood" of yellow tumuli of fresh clay pellets, each 

 pierced with a circular tube the bigness of a lead-pencil. 



A SECTION OF A BEE-TOWN OF COLLETES INEQUALIS 



Like a Western mining-village, our "bee-town" had 

 sprmig up literally in a night. The bees had evidently 

 just emerged from the ground wherein the winter had 

 been spent, and on the bright spring morning were sun- 

 ning themselves at the mouths of their burrows, which 

 rise in tiny mounds in the shape of truncated cones. 



165 



