is in question.

In addition to the cells made out of bits of reed, I put under the
bell-glass, at the same time, two nests which are intact and still
resting on their pebbles. To one of them I have attached a sheet of
brown paper pressed close against the mortar dome. In order to come
out, the insect will have to pierce first the dome and then the paper,
which follows without any intervening space. Over the other, I have
placed a little brown paper cone, gummed to the pebble. There is here,
therefore, as in the first case, a double wall--a clay partition and a
paper partition--with this difference, that the two walls do not come
immediately after each other, but are separated by an empty space of
about a centimetre at the bottom, increasing as the cone rises.

The results of these two experiments are quite different. The Bees in
the nest to which a sheet of paper was tightly stuck come out by
piercing the two enclosures, of which the outer wall, the paper
wrapper, is perforated with a very clean round hole, as we have
already seen in the reed cells closed with a lid of the same material.
We thus become aware, for the second time, that, when the Mason-bee is
stopped by a paper barrier, the reason is not her incapacity to
overcome the obstacle. On the other hand, the occupants of the nest
covered with the cone, after making their way through the earthen
dome, finding the sheet of paper at some distance, do not even try to
perforate this obstacle, which they would have conquered so easily had
it been fastened to the nest. They die under the cover without making
any attempt to escape. Even so did Reaumur's Bees perish in the glass
funnel, where their liberty depended only upon their cutting through a
bit of gauze.