Thanks to this unexpected lack of spirit in the Mason-bee, I was able for hours to pursue my investigations at my leisure, seated on a stone in the midst of the murmuring and distracted swarm, without receiving a single sting, though I took no precautions whatever. Country-folk, happening to pass and beholding me seated, unperturbed, in the midst of the whirl of Bees, stopped aghast to ask me whether I had bewitched them, whether I charmed them, since I appeared to have nothing to fear from them: "_Me, moun bel ami, li-z-ave doun escounjurado que vous pougnioun pas, caneu de sort!_" My miscellaneous impedimenta spread over the ground, boxes, glass jars and tubes, tweezers and magnifying-glasses, were certainly regarded by these good people as the implements of my wizardry. We will now proceed to examine the cells. Some are still open and contain only a more or less complete store of honey. Others are hermetically sealed with an earthen lid. The contents of these latter vary greatly. Sometimes we find the larva of a Bee which has finished its mess or is on the point of finishing it; sometimes a larva, white like the first, but more corpulent and of a different shape; at other times honey with an egg floating on the surface. The honey is liquid and sticky, with a brownish colour and a very strong, repulsive smell. The egg is of a beautiful white, cylindrical in shape, slightly curved into an arc, a fifth or a sixth of an inch in length and not quite a twenty-fifth of an inch in thickness; it is the egg of the Anthophora. In a few cells this egg is floating all alone on the surface of the honey; in others, very numerous these, we see, lying on the egg of the Anthophora, as on a sort of raft, a young Sitaris-grub with the shape and the dimensions which I have described above, that is to say, with the shape and the dimensions which the creature possesses on leaving the egg. This is the enemy within the gates.