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Updated: May 21, 2025
What reasons induced him to give up the spherical edifice? To all seeming, the same reasons that led the Osmia to abandon the Snail-shell's spiral, which requires a fatiguing expenditure of clay, in favour of the economical cylinder of the reed. By making his home in a hole in the wall, the Sparrow escapes the greater part of his work.
So far then as their building-materials are concerned, the Osmiae whom I have been able to observe are divided into two classes: one building compartments with mud, the other with a green-tinted vegetable putty. To the latter belongs Latreille's Osmia. The first section includes the Horned Osmia and the Three-horned Osmia, both so remarkable for the horny tubercles on their faces.
The laying is continuous, in so far as the variable condition of the atmosphere allows. As soon as one tube is full and closed, another is occupied by the Osmia without delay. The tubes reduced to the exact length of two cells fulfilled my expectation in the great majority of cases: the lower cell was occupied by a female and the upper by a male. There were a few exceptions.
Fresh layers are swiftly added to the dab of clay; and soon the tube is divided by a partition which has a circular opening at the side of it, a sort of dog-hole through which the Osmia will proceed to knead the Bee-bread. When the victualling is finished and the egg laid upon the heap, the whole is closed and the filled-up partition becomes the bottom of the next cell.
I have always loved this magic of the awakening spring, this smile of the first flowers against the gloomy bareness of the bark. And so I was walking across the fields, gazing at the almond-trees' carnival. Others were before me. An Osmia in a black velvet bodice and a red woollen skirt, the Horned Osmia, was visiting the flowers, dipping into each pink eye in search of a honeyed tear.
Therefore the Osmia, who is sparing of her time and strength, accepts medium-sized reeds only when there are no small ones available. The large tubes she will use only in grave emergencies and I am unable to state exactly what these exceptional circumstances are.
To sum up: in the laying of the Three-pronged Osmia, no order governs the succession of the sexes; only, the series has a marked tendency to begin with females and to finish with males.
Now the circumstances which are encountered by the Osmia, when, pressed by the necessities of spawning, she searches for a dwelling, are often fortuitous and incapable of modification; and in order to give each set of larvae the necessary space "she lays at will a male or a female egg, according to the conditions of space."
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