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Updated: May 21, 2025
Nevertheless, this represented to them a distant expedition, an unknown country; for I do not see them go on long excursions. By day, they visit the nests or the flowers in the garden; at night, they take refuge in the old galleries or in the interstices of the stone-heaps in the harmas. The most numerous is the first, the Three-horned Osmia.
I had to be prepared for it: as each mother selected her house at will and as I was unable to interfere in her choice, a narrow tube would be colonized or not, according as the Osmia who owned it was or was not able to make her way inside. There remain some forty pairs of tubes with both galleries colonized. In these there are two things to take into consideration.
With her comparative corpulence, the female Osmia will need a heap of paste twice or thrice as great as that of her brother, the male. All this is obvious; the animal cannot make much out of little. Despite this evidence, I was anxious to enquire whether the reality corresponded with the previsions of the most elementary logic.
In the Harris collection are the cells and specimens of Osmia pacifica, the peaceful Osmia, which, according to the manuscript notes of Dr. Harris, is found in the perfect state in earthen cells beneath stones. The cell is oval cylindrical, a little contracted as usual with those of all the species of the genus, thus forming an urn-shaped cell.
I am convinced of it: if the Osmia refuses big reeds and accepts them only in the last resort, when there are no others, it is because she objects to additional labour and to the mixture of the sexes. The Snail-shell, then, is but an indifferent home for her, which she is quite ready to abandon should a better offer.
Lastly, at the mouth of each tube, which projects slightly outside the case, there is a little paper tongue, forming a sort of perch on which the Osmia alights on her arrival and giving easy access to the house. With these facilities, the swarm colonized fifty-two double-galleried tubes, thirty-seven cylindrical tubes, seventy-eight Snail-shells and a few old nests of the Mason-bee of the Shrubs.
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.
My acquaintances here are too numerous; I have not the leisure to renew my former relations with all of them. Here we are at last. This high, perpendicular rock, facing the south to a length of some hundreds of yards and riddled with holes like a monstrous sponge, is the time-honored dwelling place of the hairy-footed Anthophora and of her rent free tenant, the three-horned Osmia.
With both these Osmiae, the division of the gallery is the same as with the Three-horned Osmia. At the back are large cells with plentiful provisions and widely-spaced partitions; in front, small cells, with scanty provisions and partitions close together. Also, the larger cells supplied me with big cocoons and females; the smaller cells gave me little cocoons and males.
All I ask is that the birth of my insects, that is to say, their first seeing the light, their emerging from the cocoon, should take place on the spot where I propose to make them settle. Here there must be retreats of no matter what nature, but of a shape similar to that in which the Osmia delights.
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