INSECTS 



183 



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her own eggs and doing for herself all the work of 

 burrowing the nest tunnel, and provisioning it with 

 food for the young. These solitary bees are of many 

 kinds, and exhibit a wide variety of nest-making 

 habits. For example, the mining-bees 

 make a tunnel in the ground lined with 

 a sort of glaze, and more or less branched, 

 each branch ending in a cell in which 

 a single egg is laid and a small mass 

 of pollen and nectar paste stored to serve 

 as food for the bee grub. The carpenter- 

 bees tunnel into dead or live wood. One 

 of these, known as the little carpenter-bee, 

 bores into dead twigs of sumac or the 

 canes of brambles, or other soft-pithed 

 plants, making a long tunnel through the 

 pith (fig. 140). At the bottom of this an 

 egg with a pellet of pollen paste is de- 

 posited. With some pith chips a partition 

 is made across the tunnel above the egg; 

 another egg and food pellet are put in on 

 this second story, and so on until the 

 tunnel is divided into half a dozen cells. 

 The mother bee then rests in the space 

 above the last cell and waits for her chil- 

 dren to grow up. The lower one hatches 

 first; after attaining its growth it tears 

 down the partition above it, and then 

 waits patiently for the one above to do 

 the same. The two now wait for the third 

 to mature, and so on. Finally, when the 

 last one in the top cell has come out, the 

 forth her fullfledged family for a flight into the sunshine. 

 After the last of the brood has emerged from its cell the 

 substance of which the partitions were made, and which 



\V 



Fig. 140. — Nest 

 or burrow of 

 carpenter-bee. 

 (Natural size ; 

 from speci- 



men.) 



mother leads 



