In addition to the cells made out of bits of reed, I put under the
bell-glass, at the same time, two nests which are intact and still
resting on their pebbles. To one of them I have attached a sheet of
brown paper pressed close against the mortar dome. In order to come out,
the insect will have to pierce first the dome and then the paper, which
follows without any intervening space. Over the other, I have placed a
little brown paper cone, gummed to the pebble. There is here, therefore,
as in the first case, a double wall--a clay partition and a paper
partition--with this difference, that the two walls do not come
immediately after each other, but are separated by an empty space of
about a centimetre at the bottom, increasing as the cone rises.
The results of these two experiments are quite different. The Bees
in the nest to which a sheet of paper was tightly stuck come out by
piercing the two enclosures, of which the outer wall, the paper wrapper,
is perforated with a very clean round hole, as we have already seen in
the reed cells closed with a lid of the same material. We thus become
aware, for the second time, that, when the Mason-bee is stopped by
a paper barrier, the reason is not her incapacity to overcome the
obstacle. On the other hand, the occupants of the nest covered with the
cone, after making their way through the earthen dome, finding the sheet
of paper at some distance, do not even try to perforate this obstacle,
which they would have conquered so easily had it been fastened to the
nest. They die under the cover without making any attempt to escape.
Even so did Reaumur's Bees perish in the glass funnel, where their
liberty depended only upon their cutting through a bit of gauze.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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