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Updated: May 20, 2025
Her gracious surrender of a most excellent lodging in favour of a stranger who would be incapable of offering the least resistance if a dispute arose proves the great immunity enjoyed by the Osmia in the home of the worker whom she exploits. The common and peaceful swarming of the Mason-bee of the Sheds and the two cell-borrowing Osmiae proves it in a still more positive fashion.
The conclusion therefore is exactly the same in the case of all three Osmiae.
The space left empty in the channel would mean that one of these shifts was finished and not that there were no more eggs ripe for hatching. In answer to these very plausible explanations, I will say that, the sum of my observations and they have been extremely numerous is that the total number of eggs laid not only by the Osmiae but by a host of other Bees fluctuates round about fifteen.
The two other Osmiae, with their great disparity in size between the two sexes, have to be careful about the twofold consideration of board and lodging. The more I thought about this curious question, the more probable it appeared to me that the irregular series of the Three-pronged Osmia and the regular series of the other Osmiae and of the Bees in general were all traceable to a common law.
In those aerial nests, swinging at the end of a twig, not a Dioxys, a Stelis, an Anthrax, a Leucopsis, those dread ravagers of the other two Masons; never any Osmiae, Megachiles or Anthidia, those lodgers in the old buildings. The absence of the latter is easily explained. The Chalicodoma's masonry does not last long on its frail support.
The Osmiae have a strange way of declaring their passion: with that fearsome gnashing of their mandibles, the lovers look as though they meant to devour each other. It suggests the thumps affected by our yokels in their moments of gallantry. The ingenious idyll is soon over.
Like the Osmiae and the Leaf-cutters, the Anthidium shows an urgent need of a ready-made home. She never houses herself at her own expense. Can we discover the reason? Let us first consult a few hard workers who are artificers of their own dwellings.
The only homes that I know her to inhabit are the reeds of the hurdles and the deserted cells of the Masked Anthophora. All the other Osmiae whose method of nest-building I know work with green putty, a paste made of some crushed leaf or other; and none of them, except Latreille's Osmia, is provided with the horned or tubercled armour of the mud-kneaders.
It was easy to repeat the experiment without changing anything in the natural conditions, except the direction of the cocoons: all that I had to do was to hang up some bramble-stumps as I found them, vertically, but with the opening downwards. Out of two stalks thus arranged and peopled with Osmiae, not one of the insects succeeded in emerging.
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