50 INSECT TRANSFORMATIONS. 



from the egg, and have no mother to direct or pro- 

 vide for them. 



We have numerous beautiful instances of this in 

 the solitary bees and wasps, which perform indefa- 

 tigable labours in hewing out nests in wood and stone, 

 and building structures of clay, leaves, cotton, and 

 other materials, as we have elsewhere detailed at 

 length.* But we recently met with an example of 

 this, which we shall briefly notice. A small solitary 

 bee, {Chelostoma Jlorisomne ?) not so large as the 

 domestic fly, and more slender in the body, instead 

 of digging into the ground like its congeners,"]" bores 

 a hole in a tree about the diameter of a wheat straw, 

 and, when empty, resembling externally the timber 

 holes of the furniture beetle {Jlnohhim jjertinax) for 

 which, indeed, we at first mistook them, till we were 

 undeceived by seeing the little bees going in and out. 

 When the work is completed, however, the hole can 

 only be detected by a practised eye, for it is neatly 

 covered with a substance, the nature of which remains 

 to be discovered. It is a gray semi-transparent 

 membrane, somewhat resembling the slime of a snail 

 when dried; but whether it is secreted by the bee 

 like wax, or gathered from plants like propolis, we 

 cannot tell. As we had a whole colony of these little 

 wood-boring bees in the stump of a growing poplar 

 at Lee, we cut out several of the perforations, in 

 order to examine the interior. These we found n)ore 

 than an inch deep, and filled to the brim with a thin 

 whitish honey; but, like those of the larger carpenter 

 bees of a difi'erent genus (Xylocopa), they were divi- 

 ded by several partitions of the same membranous ma- 

 terial. 



The circumstance, however, which induces us to 

 give these details here, relates to the eggs deposited 



* See Insect Architecture, pp. 24 — 64, &c. t Ibid, p. 43. 



