368 HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 



resembling gold-beater's leaf, but much finer, and so thin and 

 transparent that the colour of an included object may be seen 

 through them. As soon as one cell is completed, the bee de- 

 posits an egg within, and nearly fills it with a paste com- 

 posed of pollen and honey ; which having done, she proceeds 

 to form another cell, storing it in like manner until the whole 

 is finished, when she carefully stops up the mouth of the 

 orifice with earth. Our countryman Grew seems to have 

 found a series of these nests in a singular situation — the 

 middle of the pith of an old elder branch — in which they 

 were placed lengthwise one after another with a thin boundary 

 between each.^ 



Cells composed of a similar membranaceous substance, but 

 placed in a different situation, are constructed by Anthidium 

 manicatum?- This gay insect does not excavate holes for 

 their reception, but places them in the cavities of old trees, or 

 of any other object that suits its purpose. Sir Thomas 

 CuUum discovered the nest of one in the inside of the lock of 

 a garden-gate, in which I have also since twice found them. 

 It should seem, however, that such situations would be too 

 cold for the grubs without a coating of some non-conducting 

 substance. The parent bee, therefore, after having constructed 

 the cells, laid an egg in each, and filled them with a store of 

 suitable food, plasters them with a covering of vermiform 

 masses, apparently composed of honey and pollen ; and having 

 done this, aware, long before Count Rumford's experiments, 

 what materials conduct heat most slowly, she attacks the 

 woolly leaves of Stachys lanata, Agrostemma coronaria, and 

 similar plants, and with her mandibles industriously scrapes 

 ofi* the wool, which with her fore legs she rolls into a little 

 ball and carries to her nest. This wool she sticks upon the 

 plaster that covers her cells, and thus closely envelops them 

 with a warm coating of down, impervious to every change of 

 temperature.^ 



1 Grew's Rarities of Gresham Colledge, 154. Kirby, Mon. Ap. Angl. i. 131. 

 Melitta*. a. 



2 Curtis, Brit. Ent, t. 61. 



3 Mon. Ap. Angl. i. 173. Apis. **. c. 2. a. From later observations I am in- 

 clined to think that these cells may possibly, as in the case of the humble bee, 

 be in fact formed by the larva previously to becoming a pupa, after having eaten 



