cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in
pasteboard, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood,
miners digging underground galleries, workers handling
goldbeater's skin and many more.

Who is this one? An Anthidium [a tailor bee]. She scrapes the
cobwebby stalk of the yellow-flowered centaury and gathers a ball
of wadding which she carries off proudly in the tips of her
mandibles. She will turn it, under ground, into cotton felt
satchels to hold the store of honey and the egg. And these
others, so eager for plunder? They are Megachiles [leaf-cutting
bees], carrying under their bellies their black, white or blood
red reaping brushes. They will leave the thistles to visit the
neighboring shrubs and there cut from the leaves oval pieces which
will be made into a fit receptacle to contain the harvest. And
these, clad in black velvet? They are Chalicodomae [mason bees],
who work with cement and gravel. We could easily find their
masonry on the stones in the harmas. And these noisily buzzing
with a sudden flight? They are the Anthophorae [wild bees], who
live in the old walls and the sunny banks of the neighborhood.

Now come the Osmiae. One stacks her cells in the spiral staircase
of an empty snail shell; another, attacking the pith of a dry bit
of bramble, obtains for her grubs a cylindrical lodging and
divides it into floors by means of partition walls; a third
employs the natural channel of a cut reed; a fourth is a rent-free
tenant of the vacant galleries of some mason bee. Here are the
Macrocerae and the Eucerae, whose males are proudly horned; the
Dasypodae, who carry an ample brush of bristles on their hind legs
for a reaping implement; the Andrenae, so manifold in species; the