UPHOLSTERERS LEAF-CtJTTERS. 



parts of the poppy blossoms, and seizing them between her hind 

 legs returns with them to her cell. Sometimes it happens that 

 the flower from which she cuts these, being but half blown, 

 has a wrinkled petal. In that case she spreads out the folds, and 

 smoothes away the wrinkles, and if she finds that the pieces are 

 too large to fit the vacant spaces on the walls of her little room, 

 she soon reduces them to suitable dimensions, by cutting off all 

 the superfluous parts with her mandibles. In hanging the walls 

 with this brilliant tapestry she begins at the bottom, and 

 gradually ascends to the roof. She carpets in the same manner 

 the surface of the ground round the margin of the orifice. The 

 floor is rendered warm sometimes by three or four layers of 

 carpeting, but never has less than two. 



Our little upholsterer having thus completed the hangings of 

 her apartment, fills it with a mixture of pollen and honey to the 

 height of about half an inch. She then lays an egg in it, and 

 wraps over the poppy lining, so that even the roof may be fur- 

 nished with this material. Having accomplished this she closes 

 the mouth of the nest.* 



51. It is not every insect of this class which manifests the same 

 showy taste in the colours of their furniture. The species called 

 leaf-cutters hang their walls in the same way, not with the 

 blossoms but the leaves of trees, and more particularly those of 

 the rose-tree. They differ also from the upholsterer, described 

 above, in the external structure of their nests, which are formed 

 in much longer cylindrical holes, and consist of a series of 

 thimble -shaped cells, composed of leaves most curiously convo- 

 luted. "We are indebted likewise to Reaumur for a description of 

 the labours of these. 



52. The mother first excavates a cylindrical hole in a horizontal 

 direction eight or ten inches long, either in the ground or in the 

 trunk of a rotten tree, or any other decaying wood. She fills this 

 hole with six or seven thimble-shaped cells, composed of cut 

 leaves, the convex end of each fitting into the open end of the 

 other. Her first process is to form the external coating, which is 

 composed of three or four pieces of larger dimensions than the 

 rest, and of an oval form. The second coating consists of portions 

 of equal size, narrow at one end, but gradually widening towards 

 the other, where the width equals half the length. One side of 

 these pieces is the serrated edge of the leaf from which it was 

 taken, which, as the pieces lap over each other, is kept on the 

 outside, the edge which was cut being within. 



The little animal next forms a third coating of similar material, 



* Reaumur, vi. 139 to 148. 



23 



