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The Sitares, entrusting their eggs to the very corridors through which the Anthophora is bound to pass, spare their larvæ a host of dangers which the larvæ of the Meloe have to run, for these, born far from the dwellings of the Bees, are obliged to make their own way to their hymenopterous foster-parents.
The mess of honey amassed by the Anthophora will thus pass through the hands of three owners and remain finally the property of the weakest of the three. The Mason-bees: chaps. viii. and ix.
These insects, in fact, watch the departure of the Anthophora to endeavour to penetrate into their nests and lay their eggs there. The gallery of entry and exit has been built with grains of sand, the débris produced by the insect in working. These grains of sand glued together form, on drying, a very resistant wall. Nat., t. iii., 1804, p. 257.
Conversely, is the mellivorous larva killed by animal food? Reservations are needful here, as in the previous tests. We should be courting a flat refusal if we offered a pinch of Locusts to the larvae of the Anthophora or the Osmia, for instance. "Bramble-bees and Others": passim. There would be no use whatever in trying.
A male Anthophora, hatched a little earlier than the females, appears in the entrance of the tunnel; these mites, which are armed with robust talons, rouse themselves, hasten to and fro, hook themselves to his fleece, and accompany him in all his peregrinations; but they quickly recognize their error; for these animated specks are well aware that the males, occupied all day long in scouring the country and pillaging the flowers, live exclusively out of doors, and would in no wise serve their end.
Since we cannot admit that the Sitaris-grub leaves the furry corselet of its hostess to slip unseen into the cell, whose orifice is not yet wholly walled up, at the moment when the Anthophora is building her door, all that remains to investigate is the second at which the egg is being laid.
Everything happens as if the larva of the Sitaris, from the moment it was hatched, knew that the male Anthophora would first emerge from the passage; that the nuptial flight would give it the means of conveying itself to the female, who would take it to a store of honey sufficient to feed it after its transformation; that, until this transformation, it could gradually eat the egg of the Anthophora, in such a way that it could at the same time feed itself, maintain itself at the surface of the honey, and also suppress the rival that otherwise would have come out of the egg.
The first return and the last two seem to point to some relation between the abundance of provisions and the number of consumers. When the mother comes upon the bountiful larva of the masked Anthophora, she gives it half-a-hundred to feed; with the Stelis and the blue Osmia, niggardly rations both, she contents herself with half-a-dozen.
My acquaintances here are too numerous; I have not the leisure to renew my former relations with all of them. Here we are at last. This high, perpendicular rock, facing the south to a length of some hundreds of yards and riddled with holes like a monstrous sponge, is the time-honored dwelling place of the hairy-footed Anthophora and of her rent free tenant, the three-horned Osmia.
The Chalicodoma "also is aware of the economic advantages of an old abandoned nest"; the Anthophora is careful to establish her family "at the least expense," and profits on occasion by galleries which have been mined by previous generations; adapting herself to these new conditions, she repairs the tunnels which she did not construct "and economizes her forces."
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