Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
They want something different: a nest belonging to some one else. They bore through the stopper of the inhabited tubes, a work of no great difficulty, for we have here not the hard cement of the Chalicodoma, but a simple lid of dried mud. When the entrance is cleared, a cell appears, with its store of provisions and its egg, with her brutal mandibles; she rips it open and goes and flings it away.
If we remove the nest of the Chalicodoma of the Sheds from its tile a nest sometimes quite eight inches thick we find live inhabitants only in a thin outer layer. All the remainder, the catacombs of past generations, is but a horrible heap of dead, shrivelled, ruined, decomposed things.
My preference leant towards the Three-horned Osmia, who is very plentiful in my neighbourhood, where, together with Latreille's Osmia, she frequents in particular the monstrous nests of the Chalicodoma of the Sheds.
On the other hand, we can quite easily, without arming the eye with a lens, perceive the mouth-apparatus and particularly the mandibles of either a honey-eater, such as an Osmia, Chalicodoma or Megachile, or a game-eater, such as a Scolia, Ammophila or Bembex. All these possess stout pincers, capable of gripping, grinding and tearing.
I have not watched the work of the Chalicodoma of the Shrubs with close enough attention to be able to state definitely that this Bee is a solitary builder. Her nest is a ball of clay hanging from a bough.
The nest of the Chalicodoma, the hemisphere of mortar on its pebble, is what she is looking for, to confide her eggs to it. But the nest is now occupied by a stranger, by the Osmia, a circumstance unknown to the Dioxys, who comes stealing up to lay her egg in the mother's absence. The dome is familiar to her. She could not know it better if she had built it herself.
These sites appear to me to be in great request with the Chalicodoma, considering the number of nests which I find thus doubly supported. In nests of this kind, all the cells, as usual, have their foundations fixed to the horizontal surface; but the first row, the row of cells first built, stands with its back against the vertical surface.
Once warned of the probable difficulty of seeing the animalcule for which I am hunting, I redouble my attention, so much so that, in a couple of days, I am the owner of half a score of tiny worms similar to the one which caused me such excitement. Each of them is lodged in a glass tube with its Chalicodoma grub.
Let us open a Chalicodoma grub under the microscope, during the period of torpor. Its contents consists almost entirely of a liquid broth, in which swim numberless oily globules and a fine dust of uric acid, a sort of off-throw of the oxidized tissues.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking