Natural History / Or, Uncle Philip's Conversations with the Children about Tools and Trades among Inferior Animals

by Francis L. Hawks

Ovipositor or Gimlet of the Gadfly, greatly magnified, with a claw and part of the tube, distinct.

"There is also a bee, boys, which is called the carpenter-bee, because it is such an excellent wood-borer. It commonly looks for some old post, or dry plank, or withered part of a tree, to work in. It never works in wood that is green and has the sap or juices in it; for the bee knows, just as well as any carpenter does, that it is very hard to get tools through such wood. I expect that you have seen sometimes, when an old post or dry board was split, a long hollow groove in the middle of it, with little round thin pieces of something like paper, about as thick as a wafer, fastened in it by their edges, one above the other, all the way through. These show the work of the carpenter-bee: she bored the hole, and she put those little partitions like paper in it, to separate the cells; and more than that, she made the partitions out of the dust she got by boring. She always likes, too, to get a piece of wood in a place where the sun can shine on it; and when she has made her choice, she begins to bore at first into the post in a slanting direction, and as soon as she has gone far enough in, she then turns and bores straight, with the grain of the wood."

"Does she do it quickly, Uncle Philip?"

"Not very quickly, for sometimes the wood is very hard; I have seen one of these holes nearly twelve inches long in a very hard oak board. Sometimes she has to work at it for months; but she works steadily, boys, and that does a great deal. What makes it more tiresome is, that the poor little creature has to bring out all the dust she makes by boring."

"How large is the hole?"

"Oh, large enough to put my forefinger in, and sometimes fifteen inches long. After she has bored it as deep as is necessary, she begins to divide it into separate cells. So she commences at the bottom, and puts in a quantity of what is called bee-bread, until it reaches about an inch in height; on the top of this she lays an egg, and the bread is put there to feed the young one as soon as it comes out of the egg. She then makes a floor over it out of the dust, as I told you; she knows how to glue this dust together, and she brings it grain by grain from the heap in which she put it when she first brought it out: and she always begins by gluing the dust around the outside of the hole she has bored, and then glues another ring to that, and then another, and another, making each ring smaller and smaller, until she has it all filled; so that her floor, when it is done, appears like a parcel of rings of smaller and smaller sizes placed within each other. On the top of this floor she puts bee-bread, as before, and places another egg on it, and then covers it with a floor again; and so she goes on making cells and filling them with bread, and covering each with a floor, until she has filled up the hole."

"Uncle Philip, how do the young bees get out when the egg is hatched? It seems as if they were shut up for ever in prison."

"No, boys; there is a way for them to get out, and it shows the wonderful wisdom of God in teaching this poor bee how to contrive the matter. The egg which is put in the lowest cell being the oldest, the little worm that is afterward to be a bee will come out of that one first: now, you know, he never could get through all the cells over his head, filled as they are with bee-bread, so as to come out at the top of the hole. If he gets out at all, then, it must be at the bottom. The old bee knows this, and she so arranges these eggs that when the worm comes out it will be with his head pointed downwards; he falls to eating his bread, and so eats himself down to the bottom of his cell, and there he finds that his mother has bored a hole from his cell to the outside, and through that he comes out. When his brother in the cell above him has eaten his way down to the bottom of his cell, he just eats through the floor and gets into the cell below, which is then empty, you know, and walks out at the same hole which his older brother used before him. And so all the rest one after another eat their way downwards into the empty cells below them, and get out at the same back-door, which their mother made by what we call her instinct, which just means the share of wisdom which God gives to the lower animals to show them how to take care of themselves."