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What would happen if, after laying her egg, she left the house open and went to the cement-pit to fetch the wherewithal to block the door? Some thief might drop in and substitute her own egg for the Mason-bee's. We shall see that our suspicions are not uncalled-for.
Apart from topographical memory, which cannot serve her here, the region in which I imagine her being still unexplored, does the Ant possess the Mason-bee's sense of direction, at least within modest limits, and is she able thus to regain her Ant-hill or her marching column?
The Leucopsis' egg is not even laid upon the Mason-bee's larva; it is hung by its bent pedicle to the fibrous wall of the cocoon. When I go to work very delicately, so as not to disturb the arrangement in knocking the nest off its support, and then extract and open the cocoon, I see the egg swinging from the silken vault. But it takes very little to make it fall.
I fall back upon a fissure, a lack of continuity somewhere, although my examination fails to discover any on the Mason-bee's nest. I was better served in another case. Leucopsis dorsigera, FAB., settles her eggs on the larva of the Diadem Anthidium, who sometimes makes her nest in reed-stumps. I have repeatedly seen her insert her auger through a slight rupture in the side of the reed.
I had to come to her assistance in order to discover, before the end of the day, the object of her housebreaking. When the Mason-bee's mortar has once set, its resistance is that of stone. Now the Stelis has not only to pierce the lid of the honey-store; she must also pierce the general casing of the nest. What a time it must take her to get through such a task, a gigantic one for her poor tools!
This material is different from the Mason-bee's cement, which will withstand wind and weather for many years on an exposed pebble; it is a sort of dried mud, which turns to pap on the addition of a drop of water. The Mason-bee gathers her cementing-dust in the most frequented and driest portions of the road; she wets it with a saliva which, in drying, gives it the consistency of stone.
She fears lest she should litter the place by dropping her bit of straw on the ground, under the nest. A thing like that must be carried very far away. I place upon the honey-paste a Mason-bee's egg which I myself saw laid in an adjacent cell. The Bee picks it out and throws it away at a distance, as she did with the straws just now.
What have we done, we and the insects, to be ground with sovran indifference under the mill-stone of such wretchedness? Oh, what terrible, what heart-rending questions the Mason-bee's misfortunes would bring to my lips, if I gave free scope to my sombre thoughts! But let us avoid these useless whys and keep within the province of the mere recorder.
Later, we find nothing in the Mason-bee's cocoon except the Leucopsis' larva, gloriously fat, and, by its side, a sort of thin, rancid rasher, the remains of the deceased wet-nurse. Things then remain as they are until the hot part of the following summer or at least until the end of June.
The parasite has wiped out half the colony. To complete the disaster, it is not unusual for the grub-eaters, the Leucopsis and her rival, the pygmy Chalcis, to have decimated the other half. I say nothing of Anthrax sinuata, whom I sometimes see coming from the nests of the Chalicodoma of the Sheds; her larva preys on the Three-horned Osmia, the Mason-bee's visitor.
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