her Hymenoptera, honey-gatherers or hunters, are quite as
spiritless; and I can assert to-day, after a long experience, that
only the Social Hymenoptera, the Hive-bees, the Common Wasps and the
Bumble-bees, know how to devise a common defence; and only they dare
fall singly upon the aggressor, to wreak an individual vengeance.

Thanks to this unexpected lack of spirit in the Mason-bee, I was able
for hours to pursue my investigations at my leisure, seated on a stone
in the midst of the murmuring and distracted swarm, without receiving
a single sting, though I took no precautions whatever. Country-folk,
happening to pass and beholding me seated, unperturbed, in the midst
of the whirl of Bees, stopped aghast to ask me whether I had bewitched
them, whether I charmed them, since I appeared to have nothing to fear
from them:

"_Me, moun bel ami, li-z-ave doun escounjurado que vous pougnioun pas,
caneu de sort!_"

My miscellaneous impedimenta spread over the ground, boxes, glass jars
and tubes, tweezers and magnifying-glasses, were certainly regarded by
these good people as the implements of my wizardry.

We will now proceed to examine the cells. Some are still open and
contain only a more or less complete store of honey. Others are
hermetically sealed with an earthen lid. The contents of these latter
vary greatly. Sometimes we find the larva of a Bee which has finished
its mess or is on the point of finishing it; sometimes a larva, white
like the first, but more corpulent and of a different shape; at other
times honey with an egg floating on the surface. The honey is liquid
and sticky, with a brownish colour and a very strong, repulsive smell.
The egg is of a beautiful white, cylindrical in shape, slightly curved
into an arc, a fifth or a sixth of an inch in length and not quite a
twenty-fifth of an inch in thickness; it is the egg of the Anthophora.

In a few cells this egg is floating all alone on the surface of the
honey; in others, very numerous these, we see, lying on the egg of the
Anthophora, as on a sort of raft, a young Sitaris-grub with the shape
and the dimensions which I have described above, that is to say, with
the shape and the dimensions which the creature possesses on leaving
the egg. This is the enemy within the gates.

When and how did it get in? In none of the cells where I have observed
it was I able to distinguish a fissure which could have allowed it to
enter; they are all sealed in a quite irrep