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Updated: May 21, 2025
My preference lent towards the Three-horned Osmia, who is very plentiful in my neighbourhood, where, together with Latreille's Osmia, she frequents in particular the monstrous nests of the Chalicodoma of the Sheds. I therefore thought out a scheme for making the Three-horned Osmia accept my study as her settlement and build her nest in glass tubes, through which I could easily watch the progress.
The truncate, cone-shaped breach has often been of great use to me. Its wide base made it possible for me, without being present at the work, to judge which of the two neighbouring Osmiae had pierced the partition; it told me the direction of a nocturnal migration which I had been unable to witness. The first-hatched Osmia, wherever she may be, has made a hole in her ceiling.
I give the preference to this particular instance because of the rather exceptional fertility of the laying. An Osmia marked on the thorax is watched, day by day, from the commencement to the end of her work. From the 1st to the 10th of May, she occupies a glass tube in which she lodges seven females followed by a male, which ends the series.
But the grub which we know, the one that drains the bag of fat which may be a Chalicodoma larva or an Osmia larva, cannot move from its place, still less indulge in journeys of discovery through the thickness of a wall and the web of a cocoon.
Then comes the last whorl, which is much too wide for a single row of cells; and here we once more find, exactly as in a wide reed, a costly profusion of masonry, an irregular arrangement of the cells and a mixture of the sexes. Having said so much, let us go back to the Osmia of the quarries.
I have at hand some long bits of reed in the hollow of which an Osmia, the Three-horned Osmia, has stacked her cells, bounded by earthen partitions. "Bramble-bees and Others": chapters 2 to 5. When the reed is split lengthwise, the cells come into view, together with their provisions, the egg lying on the paste, or even the budding larva.
Does the Osmia go outside, to gather on the ground the rubbish which she flung out when boring the cylinder? On the contrary, she is frugal of her time and has better things to do than to pick up the scattered particles from the soil.
Not so either; for, in the same stone-heaps where the Osmia and the two Resin-bees of the Snail-shells work, I find from time to time another manipulator of mastic who bears no structural relationship whatever to the genus Anthidium.
Each Osmia in the left half had bored to the left, without touching the partition on the right; each Osmia in the right half had bored to the right, without touching the partition on the left. The shape of the orifices and the surface condition of the partition showed this, if proof were necessary.
The stone-heaps in the Roman quarries near Serignan, which I have so often visited in search of the nests of the Osmia who takes up her abode in Snail-shells, supply me also with the two Resin-bees installed in similar quarters.
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