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Updated: June 23, 2025
Thus we find what the Leaf-cutters taught us proved, in another way, by the cotton-gatherers. In the local flora, the insect has no precise domain; it reaps its harvest readily now from one species, now from another, provided that it find the materials for its manufactures. The exotic plant is accepted quite as easily as that of indigenous growth.
This is what we learn from the persistence of each species in its structural details, despite the great variety of the foliage employed. The evidence of the Leaf-cutters proves that a certain latitude is left to the insect in its choice of materials for the nest; and this is confirmed by the testimony of the Anthidia, the cotton-manufacturers.
Unlike the termites and Ecitons, who harbor a host of weird boarders, the leaf-cutters are able to keep their nest free from undesirables. Once, far down in the nest, I came upon three young queens, recently emerged, slow and stupid, with wings dull and glazed, who crawled with awkward haste back into darkness.
In this way almost all the native trees have at last acquired some special means of protection against the ravages of the leaf-cutters; so that they immediately fall upon all imported and unprotected kinds as their natural prey. This ingenious and wholly satisfactory explanation must of course go far to console the Brazilian planters for the frequent loss of their orange and coffee crops. Mr.
We do not here find the geometrical lid of the Leaf-cutters, the pile of disks tight-set in the mouth of the jar. The bag is closed with a cotton sheet whose edges are soldered by a felting-process to the edges of the opening. The soldering is so well done that the honey-pouch and its cover form an indivisible whole. Immediately above it, the second cell is constructed, having its own base.
One has only to watch the prolonged hesitation of a Coelioxys seeking for the Leaf-cutters' cells to recognize that the usurpation of another's nest is not effected without serious difficulties. If she turned parasite in order to make the rearing of her offspring easier and more prosperous, certainly she was very ill-inspired.
My district possesses five: A. Florentinum, LATR., A. diadema, LATR., A. manicatum, LATR., A. cingulatum, LATR., A. scapulare, LATR. None of them creates the refuge in which the cotton goods are manufactured. Like the Osmiae and the Leaf-cutters, they are homeless vagrants, adopting, each to her own taste, such shelter as the work of others affords.
The Megachiles offer us one and a very great one: the indefinite variation of their materials. What will the theorists' levers lift with this fulcrum? Why, nothing at all! Whether they cut the delicate petals of the geranium or the tough leaves of the lilac-bushes, the Leaf-cutters are and will be what they were.
In very much the same fashion, but with less adhesion among the different cells, do the Leaf-cutters act when stacking their jars in a column without any external division into storeys. Let us return to the reed-stump which gives us these details. Beyond the cotton-wool cylinder wherein ten cocoons are lodged in a row comes an empty space of half a decimetre or more.
The Colony Egos of army and leaf-cutters may quite reasonably be classified according to Kingdom. The former, with carnivorous, voracious, nervous, vitally active members, seems an intangible, animal-like organism; while the stolid, vegetarian, unemotional, weather-swung Attas, resemble the flowing sap of the food on which they subsist vegetable.
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