"They are very clever. Some are carpenters, some masons, some miners, some tailors. The leaf-cutter bee makes a neat home, covering the walls with pretty, green leaves. First she digs a tunnel in a suitable branch of wood; then she goes to a rosebush, cuts out an oval piece of a rose leaf, and arranges it smoothly on the walls of the tunnel; cuts other oval pieces and puts them on, fastening the edges neatly together. In the bottom of the tunnel she puts some pollen paste, lays an egg on the paste, cuts some circular pieces of rose leaf, which she presses on the top of the egg and pollen, forming a green roof for the room and a floor for the room above. She puts in more food and another egg, until the tunnel is full of little rooms." "And what does the carpenter-bee do?" asked Jack, looking with new respect at the bit of honeycomb he held in his hand. "She makes doors of pith, and, like the tender mother she is, sits on top of the nest waiting for her babies to grow up. This is a most unusual thing for a bee mother to do. The egg at the very bottom of the tube hatches first, but it has to wait until the others hatch. By-and-by Mrs. Carpenter-Bee takes them all out for a sunny flight in the summer air." "And they never come back any more!" sang out Peter. "Indeed they do, you care-free youngster. The pith doors have been taken down, and they come back to put things in order. They clean house; they bring out every scrap piece by piece. There is a big carpenter-bee that makes its doors of chips of wood, usually neatly glued together. There is just one lazy bee in the world of which I know, and that is a visiting-bee." "Visiting-bees?" "Yes, the guest-bees, who visit their friends the year round, let their hosts wait upon them, and never help to keep anything clean or to collect nectar and pollen. Mrs. Guest-Bee even lays her eggs in Mrs. Bumblebee's nest, and when the guest babies hatch out, it is not their mother, but Mrs. Bumblebee, who feeds them from the food she has stored up for her own children. The guest-bees are so lazy that no little baskets are found on their legs for carrying pollen." "But aren't the bees ever idle?" asked Peter, whose conscience hurt him because he never liked to work.