Page:They who walk in the wilds, (IA theywhowalkinwil00robe).pdf/139

 beech-roots, and sleep till the sun was once more nearing his height. But when spring forgot its caprices and melted into summer, she was seized with a new and imperious impulse, the impulse to found a colony and assume the sovereignty which she was born for. Her narrow cell grew distasteful to her, and she fell to searching the open, grassy slopes and bushy hillocks for more spacious quarters. After a long quest she found, in a steep and tangled fence-corner, just what she wanted. It was a forsaken burrow of the little, striped ground squirrel.

The burrow was roomy and dry, and the entrance to it was by a narrow tunnel about two feet long. The only fault Bomba could find with it was that it had a back door, another tunnel to afford its former occupants a means of exit in case of undesirable visitors. Bomba had no need of a back door, which meant draughts, so in cleaning up the nest she packed the litter into this entrance and pretty well stopped it up, intending to make it quite draught-proof later on, when she should find time to plaster it with leaf-bud gum and wax.

Meanwhile, in spite of her ceaseless activity, she was secreting thin morsels of wax from the scales of her under-body—a coarse, dark, yellowish wax, very unlike the delicate white secretion of the hive bees. This wax she presently scraped off and collected, kneaded it together, chewed it,