BURROWING AND CARPENTER BEES 



from afar the echo of the good man's joy as, with 

 radiant face and mayhap unclerical haste and mien, he 

 follows the deft upholsterer as she flies away with her 

 bundle, almost as big as herself, "holding it secure be- 

 tween its chin and fore legs." 



Our knowledge of Anthridium's manners leaves her 

 substantially where her first observers found her. How- 

 ever, of the five or six hundred species in the world 

 (according to Dr. Henry Friese), although two hundred 

 and twenty have been described, the habits of twenty 

 only are known. More than forty described species are 

 North American, of which the habits of less than half 

 a dozen are known. What a field is here before some 

 enterprising young entomologist! What possibilities of 

 new discoveries lie within this unknown realm! Bees 

 (and other insects, for that matter) are such conserva- 

 tive bodies that one may look for little change in the 

 two characteristic methods of nest-building which have 

 fixed upon them the general names of "Cottoniers" and 

 "Resiniers." But around these will doubtless run a 

 great variety of differences. 



The American species fairly represent the better- 

 known habits of the European. The Cottoniers are 

 opportunists in their nesting sites, choosing with ap- 

 parent indifference an abandoned burrow of other 

 insects, a hollow plant, a depression in the ground, or 

 even a key-hole! In all these cases they protect their 

 brooding-cells with a cottony composite rasped by their 

 toothed jaw^s from the stems of downy plants, Cres- 

 son's Anthridium illustre, as reported by Mr. S. Arthur 

 Johnson,^ from a clay-bank at Denver, Colorado, con- 



Entomological News, October, 1904. 

 171 



