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The pieces stacked into lids are round and have nothing to suggest those of which the cells and the final barricade are made. Excepting the first, those nearest the honey, they are perhaps cut a little less neatly than the disks of the White-girdled Leaf-cutter; no matter: they stop the jar perfectly, especially when there are some ten of them one above the other.
The insect has gathered pieces of them by mistake and, not finding them good to use, has ceased to visit the unprofitable shrub. Stiffer still, the leaf of the holm-oak in its full maturity is never employed: the Silky Leaf-cutter uses it only in the young state and then in moderation; she can get her velvety pieces better from the vine.
The White-girdled Leaf-cutter likes the robinia, to which she adds, in lavish proportions, the vine, the rose and the hawthorn and sometimes, in moderation, the reed and the whitish-leaved rock-rose. I have not known her to use any other materials than the wild briar and the hawthorn. Incomplete though it be, this list tells us that the Megachiles do not have exclusive botanical tastes.
The Leaf-cutter, therefore, uses only the front portion of the Worm's gallery, two decimetres at most. It is an ascending shaft, tempting to an enemy; and some underground ravager might come this way and destroy the nest by attacking the row of cells at the back. The danger is foreseen.
Let us leave the Leaf-cutter to finish depositing her eggs in other galleries, which will be colonized in the same manner, and consider for a moment her skill as a cutter. Her edifices consist of a multitude of fragments belonging to three categories: oval pieces for the sides of the cells; round pieces for the lids; and irregular pieces for the barricades at the front and back.
The pupa, or chrysalis, we have found in the cells the last of July. It is white, and three-tenths of an inch long. It differs from that of the Leaf-cutter bee in having four spines on the end of the body. In none of the wild bees are the cells constructed with more nicety than those of our little Ceratina.
Here is the flora of the Megachiles in my neighbourhood, a very incomplete flora and doubtless capable of considerable amplification by future researches. The Silky Leaf-cutter gathers the materials for her pots, her lids and her barricades from the following plants: paliurus, hawthorn, vine, wild briar, bramble, holm-oak, amelanchier, terebinthus, sage-leaved rock-rose.
The question was deserving of separate study. Two subjects of my observations, the Hare-footed and the Silvery Leaf-cutter, both of them inmates of my open-air laboratory, gave me a definite answer.
Well, the Leaf-cutter is even less well-off than ourselves. She has no mental picture of her pot, because she has never seen it; she is not able to pick and choose in the crockery-dealer's heap, which acts as something of a guide to our memory by comparison; she must, without hesitation, far away from her home, cut out a disk that fits the top of her jar.
The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter. The Life of the Grasshopper: chaps. vi. to ix.
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