The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 12

BEING A MASON-BEE FOR A LITTLE WHILE

Now, just to show you one more thing about Mrs. Mason-Bee as a house-builder--how clever she is--let's try something right here. Let's suppose ourselves--yourself and myself--Mrs. Mason-Bees. We have got a home to build for some baby mason-bees that will be along by and by. Say we already know that we must use this stone dust of the roadway, and that we must make our mortar not with _water_ but with _saliva_. Here's the _next_ problem:

Shall the mixing be done where the building is going up over there?

That's the way human masons do it. But Mrs. Mason-Bee evidently thinks otherwise, for at the very time she is prying up those atoms of dust with so much energy, you notice she is doing her mixing. She rolls and kneads her mortar until she has it in the shape of a ball as big as she can possibly carry. Then "buz-z-z-z!" Away she goes, straight as an arrow, back home, and the mortar is spread where it is needed.

You see, after all, this is the best way. If she didn't turn the dust into mortar before she started, so a good-sized lump of it would stick together, she couldn't carry much of it at a time, and it would be forever and a day before she could get her house built. As it is, the pellets she carries are of the size of small shot; a pretty big load, let me tell you, for a little body no bigger than Mrs. Mason-Bee.

And remember, this goes on all day long from sunrise to sunset. Without a moment's rest, she adds her pellets to the growing walls and then back she goes to the precise spot where she has found the building material that best suits her needs.

In building a nest, the mason-bee, in going to and fro, day after day, travels, on the average, about 275 miles; half the distance across the widest part of France. All in about five or six weeks, she does this.

Then her work is over. She retires to some quiet place under the stones, and dies. As I said, she never sees the babies she has done so much for.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SURFACE MOUNDS OF THE MASON-ANT

There are mason-ants as well as mason-bees. This ill.u.s.tration shows the works thrown up by some mason-ants that Dr. McCook found in a garden path one morning in May.]

And although they are so stoutly built, the houses of the mason-bees, like those "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces" that Shakespere speaks of, finally go back to the dust. But while one of these little mothers is building a new home or repairing an old one left by a mother of the previous year, you would suppose the fate of the world hung on it; as indeed the fate of the world of mason-bees does.

Sc.r.a.pe! Sc.r.a.pe! Sc.r.a.pe! With the tips of those little jaws, her mandibles, she makes the stony dust.

Rake! Rake! Rake! With her front feet she gathers and mixes it with the saliva from her mouth.

How eager and excited she gets, how wrapped up in her work as she digs away in the hard-packed ma.s.s in the tracks of the roadway! Pa.s.sing horses and oxen, and the French peasants with their wooden shoes, are almost on her before she will budge. And even then she only flits aside until the danger has pa.s.sed. Then down she drops and at it again!

But sometimes, the boys and the teacher found, she starts to move too late--so absorbed is she, it would seem, in the thought of that tiny little home over there among the pebbles.

Poor little lady!

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

Perhaps nothing in nature is more wonderful than an insect; particularly when you consider that he _is_ only an insect! So, of course, whole libraries have been written about insects. Here are a few of the most interesting books dealing with the subject: Beard's "Boy's Book of Bugs, b.u.t.terflies and Beetles"; Comstock's "Ways of the Six-Footed"; Crading's "Our Insect Friends and Foes"; Doubleday's "Nature's Garden"; Du Puy's "Trading Bugs with the Nations." This about trading bugs is an article in "Uncle Sam: Wonder Worker," and tells how Uncle Sam "swaps" with other nations to get rid of injurious insects and bring in useful ones.

Grant Allen's "s.e.xtons and Scavengers" ("Nature's Work Shop") tells many curious things about the s.e.xton beetles; how, by tasting bad, they keep birds and things from eating them; why you will always find an even number--never an _odd_ number--of s.e.xtons at work together; what they use for spades in their digging; why male s.e.xtons bury their wives alive, and why there is reason to believe that these weird little insects have a sense of beauty and of music.

The same essay tells about the sacred beetle of the Egyptians, the insect that we know as the "tumblebug"; why first the Egyptians and then the Greeks regarded this bug as sacred; and why men and women wear imitation beetles for brooches and watch-charms to-day.

But the greatest work on this famous beetle has been written by the famous French observer Fabre, "The Homer of the Insect." You will find this book, "The Sacred Beetle," in any good public library.

Among other things Fabre gives a very minute description of the variety of tools used by the beetle; tells how two beetles roll a ball;[17] how they dig their holes; how they "play possum," and then (I'm almost ashamed to tell this) rob their partners! How they wipe the dust out of their eyes; about a tumblebug's wheelbarrow; why their underground burrows sometimes have winding ways; why there are fewer beetles in hard times; about their autumn gaieties; their value as weather-prophets, and how Fabre's little son Paul helped him in writing his great book.

[17] You've often noticed them, haven't you? Now read Fabre's wonderful book and see how much you _didn't_ notice.

Allen's essay, "The Day of the Canker Worm" in "Nature's Work Shop," tells many interesting things about the Cicada, the locust that only comes once in seventeen years;[18] about Lady Locust's saw (it looks like a cut-out puzzle); about the clay galleries the locusts build when they come up out of the ground; how many times they have to put on new dresses before they finally look like locusts; why, at one stage of the process, they look like ghosts, and how they blow up their wings as you do a bicycle tire.

[18] "And that's once too many," as the old farmer said; and we must agree with him when we think only of the damage they do.

(Fabre's book on the sacred beetle also deals, incidentally, with the Cicada.)

Often one thing is named after another from a merely fanciful resemblance, as, for instance, the "sea horse." But the mole cricket really seems to have been patterned on the mole; either that, or both the four-legged and the six-legged moles were patterned after something _else_. Mole crickets are very useful little people to know. You should see how they protect their nest-eggs from the weather and how and why they move their nests up and down with the change of the seasons.

What good to the soil do the insects do that eat up dead-wood?

Scott Elliott, in his "Romance of Plant Life," deals with this subject.

The mining bees are very interesting, and some of these days, perhaps millions of years hence, they will be still more interesting, for they are learning to work together, although not to the extent that the bees and ants do. Working together seems to develop the brains of insects just as it does human beings.

Thomson's "Biology of the Seasons" tells how the mining bees are learning "team-work."

The tarantula spider is a relation of the six-footed farmers, you should know, although he is not an insect himself. In "Animal Arts and Crafts" in the "Romance of Science" series you will find how, in his digging, he makes little pellets of earth, wraps them up in silk, and then shoots them away, somewhat as a boy shoots a marble.

The same book tells why the trap-door spider usually builds on a slope. It also tells why she puts on the front door soon after beginning her house. (This looks funny, but you wouldn't think it was so funny if _you_ were a trap-door spider and you had a certain party for a neighbor, as you will agree when you look it up.)

The door, by the way, has a peculiar edge to make it fit tight.

What kind of an edge would _you_ put on a door to make it fit tight? (Look at the stopper in the vinegar-cruet and see if it will give you an idea.)

This book also tells about a certain wasp that makes pottery and gets her clay from the very same bank that certain other people depend on for _their_ potter's clay. This wasp sings at her work and has three different songs for different parts of the work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FIELD MOUSE AND THE FARMER

When we remember how much soil the field mouse worked over, and so made better, long before man's time on earth--to say nothing of what the mice have done since--doesn't it give an added and deeper meaning to the lines of Burns?

"I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve.

What then? Poor beastie, thou maun live."

CHAPTER VII

(JULY)

Well said, old mole! Canst work i' the earth so fast?

--_Shakespere: "Hamlet."_

FARMERS WITH FOUR FEET

Before we start this chapter--it's going to be about the farmers with four feet, you see--I want to say something, and that's this: _Don't let anybody tell you moles eat roots._ They don't! They eat the cutworms that do eat the roots. Haven't I been in mole runs often enough to know!

Of course, the moles do cut a root here and there occasionally when it happens to be in the way, as they tunnel along, but what does that amount to?

Why, in France they put Mr. Mole in vineyards--on purpose! He's one of the regular hands about the place, just like the hired man.