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Excerpt: ...the vines are valuable discoveries, providing as they do sumptuous galleries free of cost. No preliminary work or next to none is required with these. Indeed, the insect does not even trouble to make a side-opening, which would enable it to occupy the cavity contained within two nodes; it prefers the opening at the end cut by man's pruning-knife. If the next partition be too near to give a chamber of sufficient length, the Xylocopa destroys it, which is easy work, not to be compared with the labour of cutting an entrance through the side. In this way, a spacious gallery, following on the short vestibule made by the pruning-knife, is obtained with the least possible expenditure of energy. Guided by what was happening on the trellises, I offered the black Bee the hospitality of my reed-hives. From the very beginning, the insect gladly welcomed my advances; each spring, I see it inspect my rows of cylinders, pick out the best ones and instal itself there. Its work, reduced to a minimum by my intervention, is limited to the partitions, the materials for which are obtained by scraping the inner sides of the reed. As first-rate joiners, next to the Carpenter-bees come the Lithurgi, of whom my district possesses two species: L. cornutus, FAB., and L. chrysurus, BOY. By what aberration of nomenclature was the name of Lithurgus, a worker in stone, given to insects which work solely in wood? I have caught the first, the stronger of the two, digging galleries in a large block of oak that served as an arch for a stable-door; I have always found the second, who is more widely distributed, settling in dead wood

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9781153592987

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