THE BUILDER AT WORK 



a patch of damp, muddy land, and having found it, it is 

 delightful to see the dainty way in which they set about 

 their task and the pains they take to avoid dirtying them- 

 selves. With quivering wings and feet held well up out 

 of the way, with their black body uptilted behind the 

 yellow waist, they scrape away with the tips of their 

 mandibles (or jaws) and skim the glistening surface of the 

 soft mud. 



The most careful housewife, who turns up her sleeves and 

 gathers her skirts together while she is busied with the 

 rougher household duties, could not carry on her work with 

 greater regard for cleanliness. These little mud-gatherers 

 are marvels of neatness, but instead of turning up sleeves 

 they keep every part of their body from the least contact 

 with the mud, excepting only the tips of their toes, so 

 to speak, and the points of their mandibles. In this manner 

 Peloposus gathers together a pellet of moist earth about the 

 size of a pea and, holding it in her jaws, flies away with 

 it to the chosen spot. Without mixing it with saliva, she 

 then moulds it roughly and spreads it over the work which 

 she has already begun, fashioning a hollow cell about an 

 inch long and more or less egg-shaped. The cell is carefully 

 smoothed inside, but the outside wall is quite rough and 

 irregular. When she has finished one cell she makes another 

 by the side of it, then a third, and so on, all of them of 

 the same pattern ; and sometimes she places a second and 

 a third row alongside the first. Inside every compartment 

 the Peloposus puts a number of spiders, paralysing them first 

 by means of her sting ; alongside these she deposits an egg, 

 and then closes up the mouth of the cell. 



It is a horrible thing to do, and one likes to believe that 

 the poisonous wound that paralyses the spider deprives it 

 not only of the power of movement, but of all feeling too. 



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