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If he had known their cotton nests, perhaps the Scandinavian naturalist would have given them a more logical denomination. As for me, in a language wherein technical parade is out of place, I will call them the Cotton-bees. The term requires some limiting.
Next come the Labiatae: Marrubium vulgare, or common white horehound; Ballota fetida, or stinking horehound; Calamintha nepeta, or lesser calamint; Salvia aethiopis, or woolly sage. Lastly, the Solanaceae: Verbascum thapsus, or shepherd's club; V. sinuatum, or scollop-leaved mullein. The Cotton-bees' flora, we see, incomplete as it is in my notes, embraces plants of very different aspect.
We must not allow this diversity to lead us to believe in changes of instinct: that would be to strain at a Gnat and swallow a Camel. The industry of the Megachiles, for instance, consists of manufacturing wallets with bits of leaves; that of the Cotton-bees of making bags of wadding with the flock gathered from certain plants.
This stratagem had answered perfectly with the Three-horned Osmia and Latreille's Osmia, whose little housekeeping-secrets I had learnt thanks to the transparent dwelling-house. Why should it not answer for its Cotton-bees and, in the same way, with the Leaf-cutters? I almost counted on success. Events betrayed my confidence.
My present hermitage possesses several tufts of it: but, outside the enclosure, except at the foot of the walls, it would be impossible to find one. We have, therefore, a plant that is new to the country for many miles around, a cotton-field which the Serignan Cotton-bees had never utilized before I came and sowed it.
My excavations in the stone-heaps supply me with an almost equal number of nests with and without defensive embankments. Among the Cotton-bees, the Manicate Anthidium is not faithful either to her fort of little sticks and stones; I know some of her nests in which cotton serves every purpose.
To see the Cotton-bees' talents in action seems an undertaking fraught with innumerable difficulties: things happen at a depth inaccessible to the eye; and to persuade the insect to work in the open does not lie in our power. One resource remained and I did not fail to turn to it, though hitherto I have been wholly unsuccessful.
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