It may be assumed that, if the difficulty of wielding the spade at the bottom of a funnel had not exceeded my assistant’s patience and flexibility, similar excavations, repeated throughout the proper season, would have added to the number of cells served by the same shaft. How many are there altogether? Four or five or six? I do not know exactly. A moderate number, in any case. And this is bound to be so. The hoarders of food for the family are not excessively fruitful. They have no time to bequeath supplies to a numerous brood. The rearing-apparatus in the bamboo tripod has a surprise in store for me. I inspect it after the father’s departure and decease. There is certainly a column of provisions similar to that which I dig up in the fields; but these provisions are not accompanied by an egg, either at the base or elsewhere. The table is served and the consumer is not present. Can it be that the mother is reluctant to populate the inconvenient abode which I force upon her? Apparently not, for she would not first have kneaded the long loaf, if that loaf was to have proved useless. When desisting from laying because of a defective home, she would have abstained from baking a cake that would serve no purpose. Besides, the same fact recurs under normal conditions. In my dozen excavations in the fields—that their number was no greater must be attributed to the difficulty of the operation—the egg was lacking in three instances. The larder was deserted. No laying had taken place; and the provisions were there, manipulated in the usual fashion. What I suspect is that the mother, not feeling in her ovaries germs ripened to the requisite degree, none the less labours to provide a store of food with her collaborator. She knows that the horned dandy, the enthusiastic helper, will disappear ere long, worn out by toil and time. She makes the most of his zeal and his energies before being deprived of them. Thus food is prepared in the cellar to be used afterwards by the mother, now a widow. To these provisions which are all the better in that they have been improved by fermentation, the mother will return, moving them and piling them up in a lateral cell, but this time with an egg under the heap. Thus provided for and enabled to carry on alone, the widow that is to be will do the rest. The father may now die; the household will not suffer unduly. The father’s premature end may well be caused by the melancholy due to inaction. He is a hard worker easily upset by the boredom of inactivity. In my apparatus, he pines away, after the first cake has been made, because the workshop is brought to a compulsory standstill, the rest of the glass having no accommodation for superimposed cells, which later would hinder the emergence of the family. For lack of space, the mother ceases to lay eggs; and the father, having nothing more to do, departs to die outside. Idleness has killed him.