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Updated: May 21, 2025
Nothing could be prettier than the work of the last-named, who goes to the plants for her material and fashions a delicate sheet in which she cuts a graceful arch. The Chinaman partitions his house with paper screens; Latreille's Osmia divides hers with disks of thin green cardboard perforated with a serving-hatch which remains until the room is completely furnished.
Therefore the Osmia, who knew of these drawbacks before I did, refuses the reeds when they are placed perpendicularly. The same reed is used for a second purpose. We make canisses of it, that is to say, hurdles, which, in spring, serve for the rearing of silk-worms and, in autumn, for the drying of figs.
Besides, all idea of geometry vanishes if we consider the work in a tube of moderate width. Here, the Osmia does not fix the front partition in advance; she does not even lay its foundation. Without any boundary-pad, with no guiding mark for the capacity of the cell, she busies herself straightway with the provisioning.
Short of expatriating herself, a Spartan course, she has to use them all, from first to last, for she has no choice. Guided by these considerations, I embarked on the experiments which I will now describe. I have said how my study, on two separate occasions, became a populous hive, in which the Three-horned Osmia built her nests in the various appliances which I had prepared for her.
The Mason-bee of the Sheds, on the other hand, supplies free lodgings to two species of Osmiae, Osmia tricornis, LATR., and Osmia Latreillii, SPIN., both of whom are quite common. The Three-horned Osmia frequents by preference the habitations of the Bees that build their nests in populous colonies, such as the Chalicodoma of the Sheds and the Hairy-footed Anthophora.
In his artificial hives, in glass cylinders, he forces the Osmia to commence her spawning with the males, instead of beginning with the females as nature requires, since the insect is primarily preoccupied with the more important sex, that which ensures par excellence the perpetuation of the species.
When April came, my Sitaris-larvæ began, as usual, to bestir themselves. The first Bee to appear, an Osmia, is dropped alive into a glass jar containing a few of these larvæ; and after a lapse of some fifteen minutes I inspect them through the pocket-lens. Five Sitares are embedded in the fleece of the thorax. It is done, the problem's solved!
This string of fifteen appears to be rare; it was the only one that I found. My attempts at indoor rearing, pursued during two years with glass tubes or reeds, taught me that the Three-horned Osmia is not much addicted to long series. As though to decrease the difficulties of the coming deliverance, she prefers short galleries, in which only a part of the laying is stacked.
The egg had perished and the provisions remained untouched: hence the impossibility of getting out by the ordinary road. Walled in by the unsurmountable obstacle, the Osmia on the floor below had contrived an outlet through the side of the shaft; and those in the lower storeys had benefited by this ingenious innovation.
And so I do not know how the Osmia, in the dense darkness of her tunnel, distinguishes between a live cocoon and a dead cocoon of the same species; and I know just as little how she succeeds in recognizing a strange cocoon. Ah, how clearly this confession of ignorance proves that I am behind the times!
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