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Updated: June 6, 2025
What would it be had the work been done by the insect, equipped with its tools of exquisite precision? When the Mason-bee refrains, therefore, this is not due to helplessness on her part, nor to any defect in the material employed. Another objection presents itself.
We will give a smart tap to the flints so as to loosen the clay domes, wrap these up in newspapers, fill our box and go home as fast as we can, for the air will soon be as fiery as the devil's kitchen. Inspection, which is easier in the shade indoors, soon tells us that, though the devoured is always the wretched Mason-bee, the devourer belongs to two different species.
Now the Bee often brushes her back: she dusts it each time she leaves the galleries; besides, she is always rubbing her coat against the walls of the cell, which she has to enter and to leave each time that she brings honey. A Mason-bee, so smartly dressed at the start, at the end of her work is in rags; her fur is all worn bare and as tattered as a mechanic's overall.
As there is a great difference, in so far as the actual nature of the barrier is concerned, between a paper partition and a clay ceiling, let us begin by enquiring if the Mason-bee of the Walls knows how or rather is able to make her way through one of these partitions. The mandibles are pickaxes suitable for breaking through hard mortar: are they also scissors capable of cutting a thin membrane?
The series are shorter here, because the Mason-bee does not bore galleries but builds cell upon cell. The work of the whole swarm thus forms a stratum of cells that grows thicker from year to year. The corridors occupied by the Osmia are the holes which the Mason-bee dug in order to reach daylight from the deep layers.
If any doubts remained as to the incapacity of the Mason-bee of the Walls to know her nest other than by the place which the pebble occupies on the ground, here is something to remove them: for the nest of one Mason-bee, I substitute that of another, resembling it as closely as possible in respect to both masonry and storage.
Being next to the door, these impatient ones will leave the home without upsetting the shells that are slower in hatching. I experimented on Latreille's Osmia, using short and even very short stumps of reed. All that I had to do was to lay them just beside the nests of the Mason-bee of the Sheds, nests beloved by this particular Osmia.
The Osmia who, in tubes of sufficient length, divides her whole laying into a continuous sequence of females and a continuous sequence of males, now breaks it up into short series in which both sexes are present. She adapts her sectional layings to the exigencies of a chance lodging; she always places a female in the sumptuous chamber which the Mason-bee or the Anthophora occupied originally.
On the other hand, I tested the Mason-bee of the Sheds, who, when emerging under natural conditions, has only to pierce her cement ceiling and is not confronted with a series of cells. Though a stranger to the environment which I created for her, she gave me a most positive answer.
In short, the house is made use of all round, provided that the shelter be an out-of-door one; for observe that the enterprising invader, unlike the Pelopaeus, never penetrates inside our dwellings. The case of the conservatory is an exception more apparent than real: the glass building, standing wide open throughout the summer, is to the Mason-bee but a shed a little lighter than the others.
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