And although they are so stoutly built, the houses of the mason-bees, like those "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces" that Shakespere speaks of, finally go back to the dust. But while one of these little mothers is building a new home or repairing an old one left by a mother of the previous year, you would suppose the fate of the world hung on it; as indeed the fate of the world of mason-bees does.
Scrape! Scrape! Scrape! With the tips of those little jaws, her mandibles, she makes the stony dust.
Rake! Rake! Rake! With her front feet she gathers and mixes it with the saliva from her mouth.
How eager and excited she gets, how wrapped up in her work as she digs away in the hard-packed mass in the tracks of the roadway! Passing horses and oxen, and the French peasants with their wooden shoes, are almost on her before she will budge. And even then she only flits aside until the danger has passed. Then down she drops and at it again!
But sometimes, the boys and the teacher found, she starts to move too late—so absorbed is she, it would seem, in the thought of that tiny little home over there among the pebbles.
Poor little lady!
HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
Perhaps nothing in nature is more wonderful than an insect; particularly when you consider that he is only an insect! So, of course, whole libraries have been written about insects. Here are a few of the most interesting books dealing with the subject: Beard's "Boy's Book of Bugs, Butterflies and Beetles"; Comstock's "Ways of the Six-Footed"; Crading's "Our Insect Friends and Foes"; Doubleday's "Nature's Garden"; Du Puy's "Trading Bugs with the Nations." This about trading bugs is an article in "Uncle Sam: Wonder Worker," and tells how Uncle Sam "swaps" with other nations to get rid of injurious insects and bring in useful ones.
Grant Allen's "Sextons and Scavengers" ("Nature's Work Shop") tells many curious things about the sexton beetles; how, by tasting bad, they keep birds and things from eating them; why you will always find an even number—never an odd number—of sextons at work together; what they use for spades in their digging; why male sextons bury their wives alive, and why there is reason to believe that these weird little insects have a sense of beauty and of music.
The same essay tells about the sacred beetle of the Egyptians, the insect that we know as the "tumblebug"; why first the Egyptians and then the Greeks regarded this bug as sacred; and why men and women wear imitation beetles for brooches and watch-charms to-day.
But the greatest work on this famous beetle has been written by the famous French observer Fabre, "The Homer of the Insect." You will find this book, "The Sacred Beetle," in any good public library. Among other things Fabre gives a very minute description of the variety of tools used by the beetle; tells how two beetles roll a ball;[17] how they dig their holes; how they "play possum," and then (I'm almost ashamed to tell this) rob their partners! How they wipe the dust out of their eyes; about a tumblebug's wheelbarrow; why their underground burrows sometimes have winding ways; why there are fewer beetles in hard times; about their autumn gaieties; their value as weather-prophets, and how Fabre's little son Paul helped him in writing his great book.
Allen's essay, "The Day of the Canker Worm" in "Nature's Work Shop," tells many interesting things about the Cicada, the locust that only comes once in seventeen years;[18] about Lady Locust's saw (it looks like a cut-out puzzle); about the clay galleries the locusts build when they come up out of the ground; how many times they have to put on new dresses before they finally look like locusts; why, at one stage of the process, they look like ghosts, and how they blow up their wings as you do a bicycle tire.
(Fabre's book on the sacred beetle also deals, incidentally, with the Cicada.)
Often one thing is named after another from a merely fanciful resemblance, as, for instance, the "sea horse." But the mole cricket really seems to have been patterned on the mole; either that, or both the four-legged and the six-legged moles were patterned after something else. Mole crickets are very useful little people to know. You should see how they protect their nest-eggs from the weather and how and why they move their nests up and down with the change of the seasons.
What good to the soil do the insects do that eat up dead-wood? Scott Elliott, in his "Romance of Plant Life," deals with this subject.
The mining bees are very interesting, and some of these days, perhaps millions of years hence, they will be still more interesting, for they are learning to work together, although not to the extent that the bees and ants do. Working together seems to develop the brains of insects just as it does human beings. Thomson's "Biology of the Seasons" tells how the mining bees are learning "team-work."
The tarantula spider is a relation of the six-footed farmers, you should know, although he is not an insect himself. In "Animal Arts and Crafts" in the "Romance of Science" series you will find how, in his digging, he makes little pellets of earth, wraps them up in silk, and then shoots them away, somewhat as a boy shoots a marble.
The same book tells why the trap-door spider usually builds on a slope. It also tells why she puts on the front door soon after beginning her house. (This looks funny, but you wouldn't think it was so funny if you were a trap-door spider and you had a certain party for a neighbor, as you will agree when you look it up.)
The door, by the way, has a peculiar edge to make it fit tight. What kind of an edge would you put on a door to make it fit tight? (Look at the stopper in the vinegar-cruet and see if it will give you an idea.)
This book also tells about a certain wasp that makes pottery and gets her clay from the very same bank that certain other people depend on for their potter's clay. This wasp sings at her work and has three different songs for different parts of the work.