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Updated: May 22, 2025
When the Osmia, the Anthidium and probably others are unable to emerge through the customary outlet, they take an heroic decision and perforate the side of the shaft. It is the last resource, resolved upon after other methods have been tried in vain. The brave, the strong succeed; the weak perish in the attempt.
I have obtained the Burnt Zonitis, in the first place, from the cotton pouches of Anthidium scapulare, who, like the Three-toothed Osmia, makes her nests in the brambles; in the second place, from the wallets of Megachile sericans, made with little round disks of the leaves of the common acacia; in the third place, from the cells which Anthidium bellicosum builds with partitions of resin in the shell of a dead Snail.
To judge by my finds, in fact, the old genus Anthidium, that of the classifying entomologists, comprises in my district two very different corporations. One is known to us and works exclusively in wadding; the other, which we are about to study, works in resin, without ever having recourse to cotton.
The common clary and the Babylonian centaury, with which I have stocked the harmas, shall be the harvest-fields; the reaper shall be the Diadem Anthidium, the inmate of my reeds. The common clary, or toute-bonne, forms part, I know, of our French flora to-day; but it is an acclimatized foreigner.
Fabricius did not commit himself with his expression Anthidium, which alludes to the love of flowers, but neither did he mention anything characteristic: as all Bees have the same passion in a very high degree, I see no reason to treat the Anthidia as more zealous looters than the others.
Not so either; for, in the same stone-heaps where the Osmia and the two Resin-bees of the Snail-shells work, I find from time to time another manipulator of mastic who bears no structural relationship whatever to the genus Anthidium.
I note the fact without interpreting it: when the shell is a large one, the front part, almost the whole of the last whorl, remains an empty vestibule. To the spring Resin-bee, Anthidium septemdentatum, this less than half occupied lodging presents no drawbacks.
The second Resin-bee that inhabits shells, Anthidium bellicosum, hatches in July and works during the fierce heat of August. Her architecture differs in no wise from that of her kinswoman of the springtime, so much so that, when we find a tenanted Snail-shell in a hole in the wall or under the stones, it is impossible to decide to which of the two species the nest belongs.
She is well-advised to start work early and to be on neighbourly terms with the Osmia when the latter is building; in fact, we shall soon see the terrible dangers to which that same proximity exposes her dilatory rival in resin-work, Anthidium bellicosum. The shell adopted in the great majority of cases is that of the Common Snail, Helix aspersa.
The spacious galleries of the Masked Anthophora suit the Florentine Anthidium, the foremost member of the genus so far as size is concerned. The Diadem Anthidium considers that she has done very well if she inherits the vestibule of the Hairy-footed Anthophora, or even the ordinary burrow of the Earth-worm.
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