In the East Indies there are several species of wood-cutter (_Xylocopa_) and carpenter bee (_Xylocopa_), which confine their ravages to the wood after it has been felled. The wood-cutter tunnels through the beams and posts of buildings, which they frequent in great numbers. The passages are from 12 to 15 inches long, and more than half an inch in diameter. If the insects are numerous, their ravages are dangerously destructive, and they soon render beams unsafe for supporting the roof. The carpenter bee of Southern Africa is one of those curious insects which construct a series of cells in wood. After completing their burrow, which is open at each end, they close the bottom with a flooring of agglutinated sawdust, formed of the morsels bitten off during the operation of burrowing, lay an egg upon this floor, insert a quantity of “bee-bread,” made of the pollen of flowers and their juices, and then cover the whole with a layer of the same substance that was used for the floor. Upon this is laid another egg, another supply of bee-bread is inserted, and a fresh layer of sawdust superimposed. Each layer is therefore the floor of one cell and the ceiling of another, and the insect makes on the average about ten or twelve of these cells. The carpenter bee destroys the woodwork of buildings in the north of Ceylon, but in the south of the island woodwork has two enemies to contend against, viz. the porcupine and a little beetle. The porcupine destroys many of the young palm-trees, and the ravages of the cocoa-nut beetle (_Longicornes_) are painfully familiar to the cocoa-nut planters. The species of beetle, called by the Singalese “cooroominya,” is very destructive to timbers. It also makes its way into the stems of the younger trees, and after perforating them in all directions, it forms a cocoon of the gnawed wood and sawdust, in which it reposes during its sleep as a pupa, till the arrival of the period when it emerges as a perfect beetle. Mr. Capper relates that in passing through several cocoa-nut plantations, “varying in extent from twenty to fifty acres, and about two to three years old, and in these I did not discover a single young tree untouched by the cooroominya.” [Illustration: _Carpenter Bees “at work”._]