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Updated: May 6, 2025
The inhabitants of the same nest are therefore always brothers and sisters; they are the family of one mother. Moreover, if the stone presents a large enough surface a condition easily fulfilled the Mason-bee has no reason to leave the support on which she began her laying and go in search of another whereon to deposit the rest of her eggs.
There must be something more. And I was right: that arrangement in series is only a tiny fraction of the reality, which is remarkable in a very different way. This is what I am going to prove by experiment. I will begin with the Mason-bee of the Pebbles. Cf. "The Mason-bees": passim.
We know that the Three-horned Osmia prefers to haunt the habitations of the Bees who nidify in populous colonies, such as the Mason-bee of the Sheds and the Hairy-footed Anthophora, in whose nests I have noted similar facts. Thus the sex of the egg is optional.
One of these is the Mason-bee of the Walls. I need not describe again her dome-shaped nest, built on a pebble, which is now so well-known to us. "The Mason-bees": chapter 1. Each mother chooses her stone and works on it in solitude. She is an ungracious landowner and guards her site jealously, driving away any Mason who even looks as though she might alight on it.
The Mason-bee hardly ever fails to build there each year, in squads of a few dozen apiece, now on the glass panes, now on the iron bars of the framework. Other little swarms settle in the window embrasures, under the projecting ledge of the front door or in the cranny between the wall and an open shutter.
One more word on these quarrels about property. It is not unusual, when one Mason-bee is away on an expedition, for another, some homeless vagabond, to call at the nest, take a fancy to it and set to work on it, sometimes at the same cell, sometimes at the next, if there are several vacant, which is generally the case in the old nests.
The Osmia, as we see, is very frugal of the lodging that has fallen to her share; she makes the best possible use of it, giving to the females the spacious chambers of the Mason-bee and to the males the narrow vestibules, subdivided into storeys when this is feasible. Economy of space is the chief consideration, since her stay-at-home tastes do not allow her to indulge in distant quests.
A suspicion thereupon suggests itself; and the facts are so compelling that the suspicion is almost equal to a certainty. The parasitic grub, which hatches earlier than the other, emerges from its hiding-place, from the midst of the honey, comes to the surface and, with its first bite, destroys the egg of the Mason-bee, as the Sapyga does the egg of the Osmia.
She has very little of that crawling backwards to do when she has a Snail-shell for the home of her eggs and scarcely any when the home is the cell of the Mason-bee. Moreover, as the stack of cocoons numbers two or three at most, the deliverance will be exempt from the difficulties attached to a long series.
It was certainly not memory, but some special faculty which we must content ourselves with recognizing by its astonishing effects without pretending to explain it, so greatly does it transcend our own psychology. Let us continue our series of tests with the Mason-bee of the Walls.
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