slender-bellied Halicti [all wild bees]. I omit a host of others.
If I tried to continue this record of the guests of my thistles,
it would muster almost the whole of the honey yielding tribe. A
learned entomologist of Bordeaux, Professor Perez, to whom I
submit the naming of my prizes, once asked me if I had any special
means of hunting, to send him so many rarities and even novelties.
I am not at all an experienced and, still less, a zealous hunter,
for the insect interests me much more when engaged in its work
than when struck on a pin in a cabinet. The whole secret of my
hunting is reduced to my dense nursery of thistles and centauries.

By a most fortunate chance, with this populous family of honey
gatherers was allied the whole hunting tribe. The builders' men
had distributed here and there in the harmas great mounds of sand
and heaps of stones, with a view to running up some surrounding
walls. The work dragged on slowly; and the materials found
occupants from the first year. The mason bees had chosen the
interstices between the stones as a dormitory where to pass the
night, in serried groups. The powerful eyed lizard, who, when
close pressed, attacks both man and dog, wide mouthed, had
selected a cave wherein to lie in wait for the passing scarab [a
dung beetle also known as the sacred beetle]; the black-eared
chat, garbed like a Dominican, white-frocked with black wings, sat
on the top stone, singing his short rustic lay: his nest, with its
sky blue eggs, must be somewhere in the heap. The little
Dominican disappeared with the loads of stones. I regret him: he
would have been a charming neighbor. The eyed lizard I do not
regret at all.

The sand sheltered a different colony. Here, the Bembeces [digger