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Updated: May 22, 2025
Fabre's essay on this insect has not yet been translated into English; but readers interested in the matter will find a full description in "An Introduction to Entomology," by William Kirby, Rector of Barham, and William Spence: letter 21. It is a very crude and revolting art, disgusting to the eye. The Diadem Anthidium belongs to another school.
This last Anthidium is the victim also of the Unarmed Zonitis. Thus we have two closely-related exploiters for the same victim. Bramble-bees and Others: chaps. i., iii. and x. Bramble-bees and Others: passim. During the last fortnight of July, I witness the emergence of the Burnt Zonitis from the pseudochrysalis. The latter is cylindrical, slightly curved and rounded at both ends.
Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, weavers of cotton goods, collectors of pieces cut from a leaf or the petals of a flower, architects in paste-board, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers handling goldbeater's skin and many more. Who is this one? An Anthidium.
This ingenious system of defence is not the only one known to the Anthidia. More distrustful still, the Manicate Anthidium leaves no space in the front part of the reed.
I have never seen the harvesting done on fresh plants. In this way, the Bee avoids mildew, which would make its appearance in a mass of hairs still filled with sap. Faithful to the plant recognized as yielding good results, the Anthidium arrives and resumes her gleaning on the edges of the parts denuded by earlier harvests.
The Scapular Anthidium is loyal to the dry bramble, deprived of its pith and turned into a hollow tube by the industry of various mining Bees, among which figure, in the front rank, the Ceratinae, dwarf rivals of the Xylocopa, or Carpenter-bee, that mighty driller of rotten wood.
I have said enough about the dwelling of the Diadem Anthidium; let us look at the inhabitant and her provisions. The honey is pale-yellow, homogeneous and of a semifluid consistency, which prevents it from trickling through the porous cotton bag. The egg floats on the surface of the heap, with the end containing the head dipped into the paste.
Certainly, when the genus Anthidium was set down by the classifiers, they were not wanting in scientific precision: they consulted, under the lens of the microscope, the wings, the mandibles, the legs, the harvesting-brush, in short, all the details calculated to assist the proper delimitation of the group.
The parasite has retained more than one feature of those industrious ancestors. So, for instance, the Psithyrus is extremely like the Bumble-bee, whose parasite and descendant she is. The Stelis preserves the ancestral characteristics of the Anthidium; the Coelioxys-bee recalls the Leaf-cutter.
While this point escapes me, another of higher interest appears most plainly; and that is the large amount of resinous material used in a single nest, especially in that of Anthidium quadrilobum, in which I have counted as many as twelve cells. The nest of the Mason-bee of the Pebbles is hardly more massive.
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