The eggs are white, oval and very small. They measure barely two-thirds of a millimetre[8] in length. They stick together slightly and are piled in a shapeless heap which might be likened to a good-sized pinch of the unripe seeds of some orchid. As for their number, I will admit that it tried my patience to no purpose. I do not, however, believe that I am exaggerating when I estimate it as at least two thousand. Here are the data on which I base this figure: the laying, as I have said, lasts thirty-six hours; and my frequent visits to the female working in the cavity in the cork convinced me that there was no perceptible interruption in the successive emission of the eggs. Now less than a minute elapses between the arrival of one egg and that of the next; and the number of these eggs cannot therefore be lower than the number of minutes contained in thirty-six hours, or 2160. But the exact number is of no importance: we need only note that it is very large, which implies, for the young larvae issuing from the eggs, very numerous chances of destruction, since so lavish a supply of germs is necessary to maintain the species in the requisite proportions. [Footnote 8: .026 inch.--_Translator's Note_.] Enlightened by these observations and informed of the shape, the number and the arrangement of the eggs, I searched the galleries of the Anthophorae for those which the Sitares had laid there and invariably found them gathered in a heap inside the galleries, at a distance of an inch or two from the orifice, which is always open to the outer world. Thus, contrary to what one was to some extent entitled to suppose, the eggs are not laid in the cells of the pioneer Bee; they are simply dumped in a heap inside the entrance to her dwelling. Nay more, the mother does not make any protective structure for them; she takes no pains to shield them from the rigours of winter; she does not even attempt, by stopping for a short distance, as best she can, the entrance-lobby in which she has laid them, to protect them from the thousand enemies that threaten them; for, as long as the frosts of winter have not arrived, these open galleries are trodden by Spiders, by Acari, by Anthrenus-grubs and other plunderers, to whom these eggs, or the young larvae about to emerge from them, must be a dainty feast. In consequence of the mother's heedlessness, the number of those who escape all these voracious hunters and the inclemencies of the weather must be curiously small. This perhaps explains why she is compelled to make up by her fecundity for her deficient industry.