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I examined them conscientiously in the quiet of my study. I found the Osmia's cocoons arranged in short series, in very irregular passages, the original work of which is due to the Anthophora.
The slow school of the ages, the gradual acquisitions of the past, the legacies of heredity count for nothing therefore in the Osmia's education.
There is just one thing that might possibly arouse a suspicion of the cause of this irregularity in the Three-pronged Osmia's laying. If I open a bramble-stump in the winter to examine the Osmia's nest, I find it impossible, in the vast majority of cases, to distinguish positively between a female and a male cocoon: the difference in size is so small.
At the foot of the five rows of cylinders I place the inhabited shells and with these I mix a few small stones, the better to imitate the natural conditions. I add an assortment of empty Snail-shells, after carefully cleaning the interior so as to make the Osmia's stay more pleasant.
At any rate, I perceive a tendency to deviate as little as possible from the order which safeguards the emergence of both sexes. This tendency is demonstrated by her repugnance to colonizing my narrow tubes with long series of males. However, so far as we are concerned, it does not matter much what passes at such times in the Osmia's little brain.
During this curious performance, the only function of the legs is to keep the worker steady by spreading out and clinging to the walls of the tunnel. The partition with the hole in it is finished. Let us go back to the measuring of which the Osmia was so lavish. What a magnificent argument in favour of the reasoning-power of animals! To find geometry, the surveyor's art, in an Osmia's tiny brain!
To her thinking this can be nothing but the Chalicodoma's portion. We ourselves would be beguiled, in the Osmia's absence. She lays her eggs in this deceptive cell. Her mistake, which is easy to understand, does not in any way detract from her great talents as a parasite, but it is a serious matter for the future larva.
The wax cells, with their maximum capacity as against a minimum wall-space, are the equivalent, with the superaddition of a marvellous scientific skill, of the Osmia's compartments in which the stonework is reduced to a minimum through the selection of a reed. The artificer in mud and the artificer in wax obey the same tendency: they economize. Do they know what they are doing?
To divide a free lodging into chambers by means of mud partitions; to fill those chambers with a heap of pollen-flour, with a few sups of honey in the central part where the egg is to lie; in short, to prepare board and lodging for the unknown, for a family which the mothers have never seen in the past and will never see in the future: this, in its essential features, is the function of the Osmia's instinct.
The Osmia's larvæ, in fact, contrive to enclose themselves in an egg-shaped cocoon, dark brown in colour and very strong, which preserves them both from the rough contact of their shapeless cells and from the mandibles of voracious parasites, Acari, Cleri and Anthreni, those manifold enemies whom we find prowling in the galleries, seeking whom they may devour.
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