The result greatly surpassed my expectations. The earthen stopper made by me was pierced with a round hole, noways differing from that made by the mason bee through its mortar dome. The vegetable barrier, so new to my prisoner,—namely, the Sorghum cylinder,—was likewise opened by a hole, apparently made by a single effort, and the gray paper allowed the insect to pass, not by bursting through, but once more by a neat round hole. So my bees were capable of work for which they were not created. To issue from their reed cells they did what probably none of their race ever did before; they perforated the Sorghum pith and made a hole in the paper just as they would have done with their natural clay ceiling. When the moment came to free themselves, the nature of the obstacle was no hindrance so long as it was not too strong for them, and thenceforward the plea of incapacity could not be evoked where a mere paper barrier was in question. At the same time as the reed cells, two intact nests on their pebbles were placed under the glass bell. On one I pressed closely a sheet of gray paper over the mortar dome, so that to come forth the insect must first pierce the dome and then the paper, no space being left between them; while a little cone of gray paper was gummed on the stone round the other nest, so that, as in the first case, there was a double barrier, an earthen and a paper one, with, however, this difference—that the two barriers were not close together, there being a space between them of about a centimetre at the base, and increasing as the cone rises. The results of these two experiments were quite unlike. The Hymenoptera from the nest where paper had been applied to the dome came forth by piercing the double barrier, the outer one being pierced by a clean round hole, as in the reed cells closed in the same way. For the second time it is shown that if the bee is stopped by a paper barrier, the cause is not incapacity to deal with such an obstacle. On the other hand, after they had pierced their earthen vault, the dwellers in the second nest who found the sheet of paper a little way off, made no attempt to overcome the obstacle over which they would so easily have triumphed had it been attached to the nest. They died under the cover without an effort for freedom. So had perished Réaumur’s bees under his glass tube when there was but a bit of gauze between them and freedom. This fact appears to me rich in consequences. What! Here are strong insects which find penetrating tufa mere play, and a stopper of thin wood or a sheet of paper quite easy to pierce, new as these are to them, and yet these vigorous insects let themselves stupidly perish imprisoned in a cone of paper which they might have torn to bits with one bite of their mandibles. They might—but they never dreamed of doing so. The motive of their dull inertness can be only this—the insect is excellently endowed with tools and instinctive faculties, in order to