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I have described in full detail, in the foregoing pages, the structure of her nests when the dwelling adopted is a reed-stump or any other cylinder; and I will content myself here with recapitulating the essential features of that nest-building. We must first distinguish three classes of reeds according to their diameter: the small, the medium-sized and the large.
The silly Sheep does not reply to the butcher's knife by charging with lowered horns. Can it be that you are the Pompilus' Sheep? My two subjects are reinstalled in my study under their wire-gauze covers, with bed of sand, reed-stump burrow and fresh honey, complete. Here they find again their first Lycosae, fed upon Locusts.
The Pompilus is assiduous in her visits to the honeyed flower-clusters; when she has eaten her fill, she clambers up the dome and makes interminable circuits of the netting; the Tarantula quietly munches her Locust. If the other passes within reach, she swiftly raises herself and waves her off. The artificial burrow, the reed-stump, fulfills its purpose excellently.
In very much the same fashion, but with less adhesion among the different cells, do the Leaf-cutters act when stacking their jars in a column without any external division into storeys. Let us return to the reed-stump which gives us these details. Beyond the cotton-wool cylinder wherein ten cocoons are lodged in a row comes an empty space of half a decimetre or more.
We see therefore that, without the intervention of man, involuntary in the vast majority of cases and deliberate only on the experimenter's part, the Osmia would hardly ever find a reed-stump suited to the installation of her family. It is to her a casual acquisition, a home unknown to her race before men took it into their heads to cut reeds and make them into hurdles for drying figs in the sun.
That is the mechanism in the lump; but what of the artistry? Let us leave the unknown for facts within the scope of observation. I will question the Diadem Anthidium in particular, a frequent inmate of my reeds. I open a reed-stump about two decimetres long by twelve millimetres in diameter.
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