CHAPTER V
THE MINING BEES
These Bees are generally longer and slighter than the Bee of our hives. They are of different sizes, some larger than the Common Wasp, others even smaller than the House-fly, but all have a mark that shows the family. This is a smooth and shiny line, at the back of the tip-end of the abdomen, a groove along which the sting slides up and down when the insect is on the defensive. The particular species I am going to tell you about is called the Zebra Bee, because the female is beautifully belted around her long abdomen with alternate black and pale-russet scarfs; a simple and pretty dress. She is about the size of the Common Wasp.
She builds her galleries in firm soil, where there is no danger of landslides. The well-leveled paths in my garden suit her to perfection. Every spring she takes possession of them, never alone, but in gangs whose number varies greatly, amounting sometimes to as many as a hundred. In this way she founds what may be described as small townships.
Each Bee has her home, a house which no one but the owner has the right to enter. A good beating would soon call to order any adventuress Bee who dared to make her way into another’s dwelling. Let each keep to her own place and perfect peace will reign in this new-formed society.
Operations begin in April, very quietly, the only sign of the underground works being the little mounds of fresh earth. The laborers show themselves very seldom, so busy are they at the bottom of their pits. At moments, here and there, the summit of a tiny mole-hill begins to totter and tumbles down the slopes of the cone: it is a worker coming up with her armful of rubbish and shooting it outside, without showing herself in the open.
May arrives, gay with flowers and sunshine. The diggers of April have turned themselves into harvesters. At every moment I see them settling, all befloured with yellow, on top of the mole-hills now turned into craters.
The Bee’s home underneath consists first of a nearly vertical shaft, which goes down into the ground from eight to twelve inches. This is the entrance hall. It is about as thick around as a thick lead-pencil.
At the foot of this shaft, in what we might call the basement of the house, are the cells. They are oval hollows, three quarters of an inch long, dug out of the clay. They end in a short bottle-neck that widens into a graceful mouth. All of them open into the passage.
The inside of these little cells is beautifully polished. It is marked with faint, diamond-shaped marks, the traces of the polishing tool that has given the last finish to the work. What can this polisher be? None other than the tongue. The Bee has made a trowel of her tongue and licked the wall daintily and carefully in order to polish it.