NESTS OF MASON-WASPS
The carpenter-wasp is both a wood-worker and a clay-worker. He cuts tubular nests in wood and divides them by partitions. We think we're pretty smart, we humans, because we are always picking up ideas, but here's a creature, no bigger than the end of your finger, who has picked up an idea from the carpenter-bee, grafted it on his native trade of clay-worker, and made himself as nice and cosey a country place as you'd want to see!
[ABOUT THE WASP, THE FOX, AND THE BUMBLEBEE]
Here's another example of the same thing, this spreading of good ideas among the neighbors. It's about the fox, the digger-wasps, and the bumblebee. The fox can dig his own burrow when he has to, but if he finds somebody else's that he can use, he just helps himself—provided, of course, the owner isn't Brer Bear, or some other big fellow that Brer Fox doesn't care to have any words with. In the same way the digger-wasps make their own little burrows if they are obliged to, but prefer to help themselves to ones they find already made, although they don't drive anybody else out. They simply take possession of holes left by field-mice. The bumblebee does the same thing. The bumblebee digs a hole a foot or more deep, carpets it with leaves, and lines it with wax. Leading up to the home is a long, winding tunnel. As Bumblebeeville grows bigger there may be two or three hundred bees in one nest. As the bumblebee babies keep coming and coming, the burrow has to be dug bigger and bigger, to take care of them.
III. The House that Mrs. Mason Built
But the greatest of bee workers in the soil is the mason-bee. You can get an idea of what a useful citizen the mason-bee is when I tell you that one of the little villages of one species sometimes contains enough clay to make a good load for a team of oxen. Yet for all that, they might have gone on with their work for years and years to come—just as they have for ages in the past—and people wouldn't have thought much about it, if it hadn't been for some boys.
One time, in a village in southern France, a school-teacher, who was getting on in years, took his small class of farmer boys outdoors to study surveying—setting up stakes and things, you know, the way George Washington used to do. It's a stony, barren land—this part of France—and the fields are covered with pebbles. The teacher noticed that often when he sent a boy to plant a stake, he would stoop every once in a while, pick up a pebble and stick a straw into it! That's what it looked like! Then he would suck the straw.
Well, to make a long story short,[15] these pebbles had on them the little clay cells of the mason-bee. Mrs. Mason-Bee fills these cells with honey, lays an egg in the honey, and when the babies come along—don't you see? In other words, Mother Bee not only puts up their lunch for them, but puts them right into the lunch! This makes it convenient all around; for, like almost all insect mothers, Mrs. Mason-Bee is never there after the babies come.
