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Updated: May 6, 2025
To relate them would be mere repetition; I pass them over for the sake of brevity. The renewal of a test is not sufficient: we must also vary our test. Let us, then, examine the insect's intelligence from another point of view, that of the introduction of foreign bodies into the cell. The Mason-bee is a housekeeper of scrupulous cleanliness, as indeed are all the Hymenoptera.
With these facilities, the swarm colonized fifty-two double-galleried tubes, thirty-seven cylindrical tubes, seventy-eight Snail-shells and a few old nests of the Mason-bee of the Shrubs. From this rich mine of material I will take what I want to prove my case. Every series, even when incomplete, begins with females and ends with males.
It was certainly cicatricosus whose larvæ I had been studying; it was certainly this insect which ravaged the cells of the Mason-bee, for I found it dead in the old galleries which it had been unable to leave. This opportunity, which did not occur again, promised me an ample harvest. I had to give it all up.
All that I had to do was to lay some reed-stumps horizontally within her reach, in the immediate neighbourhood of her usual haunts, namely, the nests of the Mason-bee of the Sheds. Lastly, I succeeded without difficulty in making her build her nests in the privacy of my study, with glass tubes for a house. The result surpassed my hopes.
And so, all through the winter, I collect Osmia-cocoons, picked up in the nests of the Mason-bee of the Sheds; I go to Carpentras to glean a more plentiful supply in the nests of the Hairy-footed Anthophora, that old acquaintance whose wonderful cities I used to undermine when I was studying the history of the Oil-beetles. "The Life of the Fly": chapters 2 and 4.
I have named the provision-thieves, the grub-murderers and the house-grabbers who levy tribute on the Mason-bee. Does that end the list? Not at all. The old nests are cities of the dead.
The mason-bee continues to build upon the ready-completed nest presented to her. She obstinately insists upon provisioning a cell already duly filled with the quantity of honey required by the larva, because, in this case as in the other, the impulse which incites her to build or to provision the nest has not yet been exhausted.
I acquired a taste for it myself and joined the nest-hunters, putting off the polygon till later. It was thus that I first saw Reaumur's Mason-bee, knowing nothing of her history and nothing of her historian.
If some claimant puts in an appearance, forthwith the other turns her out with a volley of blows. In this way the old nests are employed so long as they have not become uninhabitable hovels. Without being equally jealous of the maternal inheritance, the Mason-bee of the Sheds eagerly uses the cells whence her generation issued.
The work is pursued so vigorously that the worker lets herself be crushed under the feet of the passers-by rather than abandon her task. On the other hand, the Mason-bee of the Walls, who seeks solitude, far from human habitations, rarely shows herself on the beaten paths, perhaps because these are too far from the places where she builds.
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