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The Megachiles offer us one and a very great one: the indefinite variation of their materials. What will the theorists' levers lift with this fulcrum? Why, nothing at all! Whether they cut the delicate petals of the geranium or the tough leaves of the lilac-bushes, the Leaf-cutters are and will be what they were.
Does it know only one definite plant, its special province? Or has it, for employment in its manufactures, a varied flora, in which its discernment exercises a free choice? For answers to these questions we may look, above all, to the Leaf-cutting Bees, the Megachiles.
If we had to believe what people tell us about the effects of heredity, which is said to hand down from generation to generation, ever more firmly established, the individual habits of those who come before, the Megachiles of these parts, experienced in the local flora by the long training of the centuries, but complete novices in the presence of plants which their race encounters for the first time, ought to refuse as unusual and suspicious any exotic leaves, especially when they have at hand plenty of the leaves made familiar by hereditary custom.
More or less stocked with cells, the reed is at last closed, right at the orifice, with a thick plug of cotton, usually coarser than the wadding of the honey-satchels. It is the equivalent of the Three-horned Osmia's barricade of mud, of the leaf-putty of Latreille's Osmia, of the Megachiles' barrier of leaves cut into disks.
A rampart at the back of the Earth-worm's shaft is a wise precaution and the Leaf-cutter deserves all credit for it; only it is a pity for the Megachiles' reputation that this protective barrier often protects nothing at all. Here we see, under a new guise, that aberration of instinct of which I gave some examples in an earlier chapter.
Like the great majority of the Osmiae, the Megachiles do not understand the art of making themselves a home straight away: they want a borrowed lodging, which may vary considerably in character. For the sake of clearness, let us cease generalizing and direct our attention to a definite species. Her customary dwelling is the tunnel of an Earth-worm opening on some clay bank.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, I saw her, all through the month of July, cutting out her rounds and ellipses at the expense of the petals of the Pelargonium zonale, the common geranium. Her perseverance devastated there is no other word for it my modest array of pots. Hardly was a blossom out, when the ardent Megachiles came and scalloped it into crescents.
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