The Schoolmaster: Carpentras 



Mason Bee,^ knowing nothing of her history and 

 nothing of her historian. 



The magnificent Bee herself, with her dark-violet 

 wings and black- velvet raiment, her rustic edifices 

 on the sun-blistered pebbles amid the thyme, her 

 honey, providing a diversion from the severities of 

 the compass and the square, all made a great im- 

 pression on my mind; and I wanted to know more 

 than I had learnt from the schoolboys, which was 

 just how to rob the cells of their honey with a 

 straw. As it happened, my bookseller had a gor- 

 geous work on insects for sale. It was called His- 

 toire naturelle des animaux articules, by de Castel- 

 nau, E. Blanchard, and Lucas, and boasted a multi- 

 tude of most attractive illustrations; but the price 

 of it, the price of it! No matter: was not my 

 splendid income supposed to cover everything, food 

 for the mind as well as food for the body? Any- 

 thing extra that I gave to the one I could save 

 upon the other; a method of balancing painfully 

 familiar to those who look to science for their live- 

 lihood. The purchase was effected. That day my 



1 Chalicodoma, meaning a house of pebbles, concrete 

 or mortar, would be a most satisfactory title, were it not 

 that it has an odd sound to any one unfamiliar with 

 Greek. The name is given to bees who build their cells 

 with materials similar to those which we employ for our 

 own dwellings. The work of these insects is masonry; 

 only it is turned out by a rustic mason more used to 

 hard clay than to hewn stone. Reaumur, who knew noth- 

 ing of scientific classification — a fact which makes many 

 of his papers very difficult to understand — named the 

 worker after her work and called our builders in dried 

 clay Mason Bees, which describes them exactly. 



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