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Animal industry is a little like our own: it does not attain its perfection save with the aid of obscure toilers, who, without knowing it, prepare the final masterpiece. I see no other reason for this need of a gratuitous lodging for the Megachile's leafy basket or the Anthidia's cotton purses.
I wish I could believe that, seeing that the place was dangerous, she made her heap bigger so that the rampart might be in proportion to the danger. Then, perhaps, at the moment of starting on the cells, she disappeared, the victim of an accident, blown out of her course by a gust of wind. But this line of defence is not admissible in the Megachile's case.
I see Anthidia laboriously provide numerous bales of cotton to stop galleries wherein never an egg was laid; I see Mason-bees build and then religiously close cells that will remain unvictualled and uncolonized. The long and useless barricades then belong to the last hours of the Megachile's life, when the eggs are all laid; the mother, whose ovaries are exhausted, persists in building.
In short, apart from the questions of texture and proximity to the nest, the Megachile's choice, it seems to me, must depend upon whether a particular shrub is plentiful or not. This would explain the lavish use of the vine, an object of widespread cultivation, and of the hawthorn and the wild briar, which form part of all our hedges.
The Megachile's scissors, so difficult to wield on anything not firmly held, would do equally bad work. Besides, I have better evidence than this for my refusal to believe in the existence of alterations when the Bee has the cell in front of her. The lid is composed of a pile of disks whose number sometimes reaches half a score.
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