fruits.

Now turn homewards, past the Rosa del monte {85b} bush (bushes, you
must recollect, are twenty feet high here), covered with crimson
roses, full of long silky crimson stamens: and then try--as we do
daily in vain--to recollect and arrange one-tenth of the things
which you have seen.

One look round at the smaller wild animals and flowers. Butterflies
swarm round us, of every hue. Beetles, you may remark, are few;
they do not run in swarms about these arid paths as they do at home.
But the wasps and bees, black and brown, are innumerable. That huge
bee in steel-blue armour, booming straight at you--whom some one
compared to the Lord Mayor's man in armour turned into a cherub, and
broken loose--(get out of his way, for he is absorbed in business)--
is probably a wood-borer, {85c} of whose work you may read in Mr.
Wood's Homes without Hands. That long black wasp, commonly called a
Jack Spaniard, builds pensile paper nests under every roof and shed.
Watch, now, this more delicate brown wasp, probably one of the
Pelopoei of whom we have read in Mr. Gosse's Naturalist in Jamaica
and Mr. Bates's Travels on the Amazons. She has made under a shelf
a mud nest of three long cells, and filled them one by one with
small spiders, and the precious egg which, when hatched, is to feed
on them. One hundred and eight spiders we have counted in a single
nest like this; and the wasp, much of the same shape as the Jack
Spaniard, but smaller, works, unlike him, alone, or at least only
with her husband's help. The long mud nest is built upright, often
in the angle of a doorpost or panel; and always added to, and
entered from, below. With a joyful hum she flies back to it all day
long with her pellets of mud, and spreads them out with her mouth