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The insect is scarce and lives apart; a meeting is an event upon which we must not count with too great confidence. It is an African species and loves the heat that ripens the carob and the date. It haunts the sunniest spots and selects rocks or firm stones as a foundation for its nest. Sometimes also, but seldom, it copies the Chalicodoma of the Walls and builds upon an ordinary pebble.
The Stelis, who is much smaller than the Chalicodoma, finds enough food in a single cell for the rearing of several of her grubs. The mother lays a number of eggs, which I have seen vary between the extremes of two and twelve, on the surface, next to the Mason's egg, which itself undergoes no outrage whatever. Things do not go so badly at first.
Such is a brief sketch of the two parasites of the Chalicodoma of the Pebbles, true parasites, consumers of provisions hoarded on behalf of others. Their crimes are not the bitterest tribulations of the Mason-bee. If the first starves the Mason's grub to death, if the second makes it perish in the egg, there are others who have a more pitiable ending in store for the worker's family.
The Stelis does something of the kind; but who would think of proclaiming a relationship between the Chalicodoma and her? The two have nothing in common. I call for a scion of the Mason-bee of the Sheds who shall live by the art of breaking through ceilings.
They form a sort of coarse stucco, on the more or less smooth cupola of the Chalicodoma; and this unevenness, as well as the green colouring of its mortar of masticated leaves, at once betrays the Osmia's nest.
I do not know exactly how long the Stelis takes to make her entrance-shaft, as I have never had the opportunity or rather the patience to follow the work from start to finish; but what I do know is that a Chalicodoma of the Walls, incomparably larger and stronger than the parasite, when demolishing before my eyes the lid of a cell sealed only the day before, was unable to complete her undertaking in one afternoon.
The pebbles in the waste-lands supply me with plenty of buildings of the Chalicodoma of the Walls; the byres scattered here and there in the fields give me, under their dilapidated roofs, in fragments broken off with the chisel, the edifices of the Chalicodoma of the Sheds.
In nooks which they repair in summary fashion with earthen embankments or clay partitions, Hunting Wasps Pompili and Tripoxyla store up small members of the Spider tribe, including sometimes the Weaving Spiders who live in the same ruins. I have said nothing yet of the Chalicodoma of the Shrubs.
The succession first of females and then of males is not, in fact, invariable. Thus, the Chalicodoma, whose nests serve for two or three generations, ALWAYS lays male eggs in the old male cells, which can be recognized by their lesser capacity, and female eggs in the old female cells of more spacious dimensions.
As Reaumur tells us, the Chalicodoma of the Walls in the northern provinces selects a wall directly facing the sun and one not covered with plaster, which might come off and imperil the future of the cells. She confides her buildings only to solid foundations, such as bare stones.
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