MASON-BEE CELLS AMONG THE ROCKS
There were so many of these pebbles scattered over the plain, and the bees that were building new homes or repairing old ones flew so straight and so fast between the pebbles and a near-by road that "they looked like trails of smoke," as Fabre expresses it.
Now, you may well wonder why the bees flew clear over to that road to get dirt to build their nests when there was plenty of loose earth right at their own door-steps; right around the pebbles themselves. Isn't that queer?
Well, here's something that sounds stranger still. Mrs. Mason-Bee takes those extra trips because a roadway is so much harder to dig in! It's not because she needs the exercise, goodness knows—this busy Mrs. Mason-Bee—but because the hard earth of the roadway makes the strongest homes; that is, when she finally gets it dug out and worked up. And here's another thing that will seem odd at first; although the soil she thus works over must be dampened before she can plaster it into the walls of her home, she just won't use damp soil to begin with. Nothing will do her but dust, and dust that she herself scrapes from the roadway. The reason of this is that the moisture already in the soil will not answer at all. She has got to knead the soil carefully and thoroughly with saliva, which acts as a kind of mortar. This saliva, of course, she supplies.
And the dust she works with must be as fine as powder and as dry as a bone. Then it absorbs the saliva, and when it dries it is almost like stone. In fact it's a kind of cement, like that men use for sidewalks and for buildings and bridges.
Copyright by Brown Brothers.
FABRE STUDYING THE MASON-BEE
But this wonderful old teacher and his boys[16] found that even this isn't all this little house-builder and house-keeper has to think of. She must have dust that is really ground-up stone! So she digs in the roadway where the bits of stone in this stony soil have been ground to powder and then packed hard by the wheels of the farmer's cart and by the hoofs of horses and oxen drawing their heavy loads. But what did Mrs. M. B. do for ground-up stone in the long ages before man came along with his carts? Mr. Earl Reed, who, beside being the distinguished etcher of "The Dunes," is a close observer of nature in general, tells me he has often seen a mason-bee gathering the pulverized stone at the base of cliffs. Evidently the mills of the wind and rain, that we have read of in previous chapters, had Mrs. B's wants in mind too.