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Updated: May 22, 2025
Like the Osmiae and the Leaf-cutters, the Anthidium shows an urgent need of a ready-made home. She never houses herself at her own expense. Can we discover the reason? Let us first consult a few hard workers who are artificers of their own dwellings.
No, the Stelis never abandoned the delicate art of cotton-weaving to break down walls and to grind cement, a class of work far too unattractive to efface the memory of the joys of harvesting amid the flowers. Indolence has not evolved her from an Anthidium. She has always been what she is to-day: a patient artificer in her own line, a steady worker at the task that has fallen to her share.
Lastly, to complete the enumeration of the Bees known to me as making their homes in the Mason's cupolas, I must add Megachile apicalis, who piles in each cell a half-dozen or more honey-pots constructed with disks cut from the leaves of the wild rose, and an Anthidium whose species I cannot state, having seen nothing of her but her white cotton sacks.
I remembered finding, at rare intervals, nests of both the Anthidium and the Megachile in the hollows of cut reeds. I thereupon installed some hives of a new kind on the sunniest walls of my enclosure.
Ask of the Halictus, which, no longer capable of becoming a mother, makes herself guardian of a city, in order still to labour within the measure of her means. Ask of the Osmia, the Megachile, the Anthidium, which "with no maternal aim, for the sole joy of labour, strive to expend their forces in the accomplishment of their vain tasks, until the forces of life fail."
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.
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.
Whereas some Bees, such as the Anthidium and the Chalicodoma, share the Osmia's talent for using the twofold exit, others, such as the Solenius and the Leaf-cutter, behave like a flock of sheep and follow the first that goes out.
They are the following: Anthidium septemdentatum, LATR., A. bellicosum, LEP., A. quadrilobum, LEP., and A. Latreillii, LEP. The first two make their nests in deserted Snail-shells; the other two shelter their groups of cells sometimes in the ground, sometimes under a large stone. We will first discuss the inhabitants of the Snail-shell.
And now, with the facts to support us, let us philosophize a little. We have here, recognized as of excellent standard by all the expert classifiers, so fastidious in the arrangement of their lists, a generic group, called Anthidium, containing two guilds of workers entirely dissimilar in character: the cotton-fullers and the resin-kneaders.
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