tunnel should have come in time to be left empty—what advantage, that is to say, its being so represents—it is not easy to see, but possibly it stood in danger of being reached by a bird’s beak, through what has now become the exit of escape merely. As there is a leaf-cutting ant, so, too, there is a leaf-cutting bee, but here the resemblance ends, since no thought of food or fungus enters the mind of the latter insect. Her more simple and direct object is to make the severed leaves into cells, and this she does with wonderful skill and ingenuity. The cells, which are made by rolling the pieces of leaves round within a tunnel or gallery, previously excavated in the earth, are separated from one another by a circular piece, which fits into the tube with extreme nicety, making at once the ceiling of each lower compartment and the floor of that above it. As each is finished the bee, as in the other instances, fills it with a mixture of honey and pollen, upon which she then lays an egg, and finally closes the mouth of the tunnel. The leaf principally used for the manufacture of these pretty cradles is the rose leaf, and the paste which fills them is of a rose-red colour, owing to the pollen having been collected for the most part from thistles. The children of the leaf-cutting bee, therefore, are delicately housed, but what are they, in this respect, to those of the poppy or tapestry bee, who are born like the Byzantine princes in a “purple[89] chamber” made of the rich leaves of poppies? Here they lie, or crawl, in state, one to each royal apartment, which is filled, almost to the brim, with the sweet food of bees. Yet when they come forth, at last, it is not as gorgeous imperial creatures clothed in “purple and pall,” but only little ordinary-looking black bees covered all over with dirty grey hair. And their beautiful purple poppy chamber has been seen by no one—not even by themselves probably—buried as it is full three inches deep in the earth. Wallace, somewhere in his _Malay Archipelago_, moralises over the beautiful little kingbird of paradise, sparkling out its life amidst the forest solitudes of a remote island, unseen by human eyes, save those of savages, till once or twice, perhaps, in a century, some wandering white man, who alone is capable of appreciating its beauty, comes to bang its life out and bear away its skin. The thought of this dainty little crimson-tapestried bower lying in black darkness, like a grave beneath one’s feet, rouses a similar train of reflection in the mind, but perhaps it would do so more strongly were it associated in the same degree with ideas of sport or profitable collecting.