mason-bees

Down the centre of each of its four faces runs a line of deeply-cut hieroglyphics, in whose cavities the wild mason-bees construct their mud-cells and store their honey.

Roman Mosaics Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood Hugh Macmillan

What a marvelous company Van Bruyssel found on his old pear tree; and what inexhaustible worlds did Fabre discover in the lives of the spider, the fly, the caterpillar, the wasps, the mason-bees and others!

The Apple-Tree The Open Country Books—No. 1 1906

Besides the common honeybee there are many others here, fine, burly, mossy fellows, such as were nourished on the mountains many a flowery century before the advent of the domestic species -- bumblebees, mason-bees, carpenter-bees, and leaf-cutters.

Steep Trails John Muir 1876

From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded with sunlight, where the swallows skim and the brown hawks circle and the mason-bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings.

New Italian sketches John Addington Symonds 1866

Exposed to the icy winds of a Lombard winter, to the fierce fire of a Lombard summer, and to the moist vapours of a Lombard autumn; neglected by unheeding generations; with flowers clustering in their crannies, and birds nesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network of their traceries -- they still present angles as sharp as when they were but finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the first months of their building.

Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete Series I, II, and III John Addington Symonds 1866

Exposed to the icy winds of a Lombard winter, to the fierce fire of a Lombard summer, and to the moist vapours of a Lombard autumn; neglected by unheeding generations; with flowers clustering in their crannies, and birds nesting in their eaves, and mason-bees filling the delicate network of their traceries -- they still present angles as sharp as when they were but finished, and joints as nice as when the mortar dried in the first months of their building.

Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, First Series John Addington Symonds 1866