HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 489 



her offspring. For this she usually selects an angle, shel- 

 tered by any projection, on the south side of a stone wall. 

 Her next care is to provide materials for the structure. 

 The chief of these is sand, which she carefully selects 

 grain by grain from such as contains some mixture of 

 earth. These grains she glues together with her viscid 

 saliva into masses the size of small shot, and transports 

 by means of her jaws to the site of her castle a . With a 

 number of these masses, which are the artificial stone of 

 which her building is to be composed, united by a ce- 

 ment preferable to ours, she first forms the basis or foun- 

 dation of the whole. Next she raises the walls of a cell, 

 which is about an inch in length and half an inch broad, 

 and before its orifice is closed in form resembles a thim- 

 ble. This, after depositing an egg and a supply of honey 

 and pollen, she covers in, and then proceeds to the erec- 

 tion of a second, which she finishes in the same manner, 

 until the whole number, which varies from four to eight, 

 is completed. The vacuities between the cells, which 

 are not placed in any regular order, some being parallel 

 to the wall, others perpendicular to it, and others in- 

 clined to it at different angles, this laborious architect 

 fills up with the same material of which the cells are 

 composed, and then bestows upon the whole group a 

 common covering of coarser grains of sand. The form 

 of the whole nest, which when finished is a solid mass 

 of stone so hard as not to be easily penetrated with the 

 blade of a knife, is an irregular oblong of the same co- 



a Reaumur plausibly supposes that it has been from observing this 

 bee thus loaded, that the tale mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny, of 

 the hive-bee's ballasting itself with a bit of stone previously to flying 

 home in a high wind, has arisen. 



