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Updated: June 6, 2025
But these are popular resorts, where hundreds and thousands of workers labour, each for herself. If she be alone, which happens pretty often, the Sicilian Mason-bee instals herself in the first little nook handy, provided that it supplies a solid foundation and warmth. As for the nature of this foundation, she does not seem to mind.
But scrape away the crust of cement and we shall easily recognize the cells below and their layers of tiny pebbles. Instead of building a brand-new nest, on a hitherto unoccupied boulder, the Mason-bee of the Walls is always glad to make use of the old nests which have lasted through the year without suffering any damage worth mentioning.
It seems to me therefore, exceedingly probable that the family is a small one and that it is all installed on the one stone, at any rate when the Mason-bee is building a new home.
At the time when the work of construction is in progress, she is an impudent visitor of the nests, exploiting with the same effrontery the enormous cities of the Mason-bee of the Sheds and the solitary cupolas of the Mason-bee of the Pebbles. An innumerable population, coming and going, humming and buzzing, strikes her with no awe.
As soon as her egg is laid, the Mason-bee of the Sheds comes out of her cell and at once turns round and proceeds to close it up with the pellet of mortar which she holds ready in her mandibles. The material is employed with such method that the actual sealing is done in a moment: the other pellets, the object of repeated journeys, will serve merely to increase the thickness of the lid.
Despite the presence of Meloe cicatricosus in the dwellings of the Mason-bee, which I so often ransacked in compiling the history of the Sitares, I never saw this insect, at any season of the year, wandering on the perpendicular soil, at the entrance of the corridors, for the purpose of laying its eggs there, as the Sitares do; and I should know nothing of the details of the egg-laying if Godart, de Geer and, above all, Newport had not informed us that the Oil-beetles lay their eggs in the earth.
I have seen some of these nests, under the tiles of a shed, spreading over an area of five or six square yards. When the colony was hard at work, the busy, buzzing crowd was enough to make one giddy. The under side of a balcony also pleases the Mason-bee, as does the embrasure of a disused window, especially if it is closed by a blind whose slats allow her a free passage.
It goes without saying that the surface layer, even of the lower storeys, can contain males without invalidating the rule, for this layer may always be looked upon as the Chalicodoma's last work. Everything therefore contributes to show that, in the Mason-bee, the females take the lead in the order of primogeniture.
Enough for us to know that she dislikes narrow and long tubes, not because they are narrow, but because they are at the same time long. And, in fact, she does very well with a short tube of the same diameter. Such are the cells in the old nests of the Mason-bee of the Shrubs and the empty shells of the Garden Snail. With the short tube the two disadvantages of the long tube are avoided.
We thus become aware, for the second time, that, when the Mason-bee is stopped by a paper barrier, the reason is not her incapacity to overcome the obstacle.
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