"They are very clever. Some are carpenters, some masons, some miners, some tailors. The leaf-cutter bee makes a neat home, covering the walls with pretty, green leaves. First she digs a tunnel in a suitable branch of wood; then she goes to a rosebush, cuts out an oval piece of a rose leaf, and arranges it smoothly on the walls of the tunnel; cuts other oval pieces and puts them on, fastening the edges neatly together. In the bottom of the tunnel she puts some pollen paste, lays an egg on the paste, cuts some circular pieces of rose leaf, which she presses on the top of the egg and pollen, forming a green roof for the room and a floor for the room above. She puts in more food and another egg, until the tunnel is full of little rooms."
"And what does the carpenter-bee do?" asked Jack, looking with new respect at the bit of honeycomb he held in his hand.
"She makes doors of pith, and, like the tender mother she is, sits on top of the nest waiting for her babies to grow up. This is a most unusual thing for a bee mother to do. The egg at the very bottom of the tube hatches first, but it has to wait until the others hatch. By-and-by Mrs. Carpenter-Bee takes them all out for a sunny flight in the summer air."
"And they never come back any more!" sang out Peter.
"Indeed they do, you care-free youngster. The pith doors have been taken down, and they come back to put things in order. They clean house; they bring out every scrap piece by piece. There is a big carpenter-bee that makes its doors of chips of wood, usually neatly glued together. There is just one lazy bee in the world of which I know, and that is a visiting-bee."
"Visiting-bees?"
"Yes, the guest-bees, who visit their friends the year round, let their hosts wait upon them, and never help to keep anything clean or to collect nectar and pollen. Mrs. Guest-Bee even lays her eggs in Mrs. Bumblebee's nest, and when the guest babies hatch out, it is not their mother, but Mrs. Bumblebee, who feeds them from the food she has stored up for her own children. The guest-bees are so lazy that no little baskets are found on their legs for carrying pollen."
"But aren't the bees ever idle?" asked Peter, whose conscience hurt him because he never liked to work.
"No bee except the guest-bee and drone is ever idle. The happy-go-lucky bumblebee, which buzzes so near us on these warm summer days, is always on the go, although she is easy-going and happy-go-lucky. Mrs. Bumblebee isn't an over-particular person, as bee persons go. She is not a careful housekeeper, like her cousin Mrs. Honey-Bee, but she carries her own burdens just the same, and probably is as contented in her roughly made, untidy house as Mrs. Honey-Bee is in her beautifully neat one. Sometimes she has a nest as big as your head, with rooms in it of all sizes and shapes. She probably thinks the honey-bee family would get along just as well if they were a little less fussy, and probably she is right. Early in the spring Mrs. Bumblebee starts out house-hunting. When she finds the place she wants she puts some honey and pollen there, and lays an egg on the little pile. After a while the larvas come out of the eggs. When they have eaten what they want they make a cocoon, and curl up for a rest while they are being made into little workers. You know, the bee family is made up of the mother bee, who is called the queen, and many fathers, who are called drones; all the rest are workers."
"That's something like the ants, sir, isn't it?"