Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
Here is a cocoon of the Mason-bee of the Pebbles with an egg side by side with the Chalicodoma-grub. But what a curious egg! Never have my eyes beheld the like; and then is it really the egg of the Leucopsis? Great was my apprehension. But I breathed again when I found, a couple of weeks later, that the egg had become the larva with which I was familiar.
But here everything happens in broad daylight; and this demands more cunning in the method of installation. Besides, it is the one favourable moment for the Dioxys. If she waits for the Mason-bee to lay, it is too late, for the parasite is not able to break down doors, as the Stelis does.
It would seem, therefore, that these tiny minds are created and shaped by means of experience; they recognize "that which is most fitting"; they learn, they compare; may we not also say that they judge? Does not the Mason-bee, "which rakes the roads for a dry powdery dust and mixes it with saliva to convert it into a hard cement," foresee that this mud will harden?
Let us in the first place consult the old nests of the Mason-bee of the Shrubs. I have said that these mortar spheroids, pierced all over with little cylindrical cavities, are adopted pretty eagerly by the Three-horned Osmia, who colonizes them before my eyes with females in the deep cells and males in the shallow cells. That is how things go when the old nest remains in its natural state.
One stacks her cells in the spiral staircase of an empty snail-shell; another, attacking the pith of a dry bit of bramble, obtains for her grubs a cylindrical lodging and divides it into floors by means of partition-walls; a third employs the natural channel of a cut reed; a fourth is a rent-free tenant of the vacant galleries of some Mason-bee.
Thanks to this unexpected lack of spirit in the Mason-bee, I was able for hours to pursue my investigations at my leisure, seated on a stone in the midst of the murmuring and distracted swarm, without receiving a single sting, though I took no precautions whatever.
Her repeated discomfitures do not make her abandon the preliminary inspection of the home, an inspection which becomes quite useless when renewed for the tenth or twentieth time. The Mason-bee of the Walls shows us, under another form, a similar repetition of an act which is useless in itself, but which is the compulsory preface to the act that follows.
In these short series, both sexes are usually present; and, if the Mason-bee's chamber is at the end of the passage, it is inhabited by a female Osmia. We come back to what the short tubes and the old nests of the Mason-bee of the Pebbles have already taught us.
If I detach from its pebble the nest of the Mason-bee, the Chalicodoma of the Walls, I see cells of large capacity, sumptuously provisioned; close beside these I see others, of less capacity, with victuals parsimoniously allotted.
One more detail not without value: it is not necessary for you to intervene and imprison Mason-bees for a time in order to witness the acts of violence which I have described. If you follow the work of the swarm assiduously, you may occasionally find a surprise awaiting you. A Mason-bee will appear and, for no reason known to you, break open a door and lay her egg in the violated cell.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking