1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’, regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests, just like human beings, and [[70]]fight, positively, like Christians. “Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen from the public common and sold.
2. The wood-piercing bee cuts out her nest in decayed wood; the nest being a hollow pipe like a chimney, or a group of such pipes, each divided by regular floors, into cells for the children; one egg is put in each cell, and the cell filled with a paste made of the farina of flowers mixed with honey, for the young bee to eat when it is hatched. Now this carpentering work, I find, is done wholly by the wood-piercing bee’s strong jaws; but here again is no picture of her jaws, or the teeth in them; though the little heaps of sawdust outside where she is working “are of grains nearly as large as those produced by a handsaw”; and she has to make her floors of these grains, by gluing them in successive rings from the outside of her cell to the centre. Yes; that’s all very well; but then I want to know if she cuts the bits of any particular shape, as, suppose, in flattish pieces like tiles, and if then she glues these sideways or edgeways in their successive rings. [[71]]
But here is the prettiest thing of all in her work. It takes, of course, a certain time to collect the farina with which each cell is filled, and to build the floor between it and the nest; so that the baby in the room at the bottom of the pipe will be born a day or two before the baby next above, and be ready to come out first; and if it made its way upwards, would disturb the next baby too soon. So the mother puts them all upside down, with their feet—their tails, I should say—uppermost; and then when she has finished her whole nest, to the last cell at the top, she goes and cuts a way at the bottom of it, for the oldest of the family to make her way out, as she naturally will, head-foremost, and so cause the others no discomfort by right of primogeniture.
3. The wool-gathering bee is described by White of Selborne, as “frequenting the Garden Campion, for the sake of its Tomentum.” I lose half an hour in trying to find out the Garden Campion among the thirty-two volumes of old Sowerby: I find nothing but the sort of white catchfly things that grow out of hollow globes, (which Mary of the Giessbach, by the way, spoken of in a former letter, first taught me to make pops with). I vainly try to find out what “Campion” means. Johnson fails me this time. “Campion, the name of a plant.” I conjecture it must be simple for champion, “keeper of the field,”—and let that pass; but lose myself again presently in the derivation of Tomentum, and its relation [[72]]to Tome, in the sense of a volume. Getting back out of all that, rather tired, I find at last in Bingley that the Garden Campion is Agrostemma Coronaria of Linnæus; and I look in my Linnæus, and find it described as Tomentosum; and then I try my two Sowerbys, ancient and modern, where I find nothing under Agrostemma but the corn-cockle, and so have to give in at last; but I can tell Agnes, at least, that there’s some sort of pink which has a downy stem, and there’s some sort of bee which strips off the down from the stalk of this pink, “running from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver.”
Hoop-shaver? but I never saw so much as a hoop-shaver! Must see one on the first chance, only I suppose they make hoops by steam now.
“When it has got a bundle almost as large as itself it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and forelegs.”
Chin?—what is a bee’s chin like?
Then comes a story about a knight’s finding the key wouldn’t turn in the lock of his garden gate; and there being a wool-gathering bee’s nest inside: and it seems she makes her cells or thimbles of this wool, but does not fill them with honey inside; so that I am in doubt whether the early life of the young bees who live in wood, and have plenty to eat, be not more enviable than the lot of those who live in wool and have no larders. I can’t find any more about [[73]]the wool-gatherer; and the fourth kind of bee, most interesting of all, must wait till next Fors’ time, for there’s a great deal to be learnt about her.
‘And what of the St. George’s Company meanwhile’?
Well, if I cannot show it some better method of teaching natural history than has been fallen upon by our recent Doctors, we need not begin our work at all. We cannot live in the country without hunting animals, or shooting them, unless we learn how to look at them. [[75]]