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Updated: May 31, 2025
Having thus assigned a due share both to instinct and the aberrations of instinct when the course of its different phases is disturbed, let us see what discernment is able to do in the selection of a site for the nest and materials for building it; and, leaving the Pelopaeus, upon whom it is useless to dwell any longer, let us consider other examples, picked from among those richest in variations.
In short, the house is made use of all round, provided that the shelter be an out-of-door one; for observe that the enterprising invader, unlike the Pelopaeus, never penetrates inside our dwellings. The case of the conservatory is an exception more apparent than real: the glass building, standing wide open throughout the summer, is to the Mason-bee but a shed a little lighter than the others.
While the mason-bee does not notice that her cell has been emptied, the Pelopaeus cannot perceive that the tricks of the experimenter have resulted in the disappearance of her progeny; and she "continues to store away spiders for a germ that no longer exists; she perseveres untiringly in her useless hunting, as though the future of her larva depended on it; she amasses provisions which will feed no one; more, she pushes aberration to the extent of plastering even the place where her nest was if we remove it, giving the last strokes of the trowel to an imaginary building, and putting her seals upon empty nothing."
Here, except at the actual periphery, where the tube itself supplies a foundation, everything has to be obtained by sheer building: the floor, the ceiling, the walls of the many-sided compartment are one and all made of mortar. The structure is almost as costly in materials as that of the Chalicodoma or the Pelopaeus. It must be pretty difficult, too, when one thinks of its irregularity.
The absence of the work already executed and the hardness of the metal do not warn you that you are now engaged upon a senseless task. You remind me of the Pelopaeus, who used to coat with mud the place on the wall whence her nest had been removed.
This is more particularly the case with the Three-horned Osmia, who, as she uses clayey materials very easily affected by the rain, requires, like the Pelopaeus, a dry shelter for her cells, a shelter which she finds ready-made and uses just as it is, after a few touches by way of sweeping and cleansing.
When I made her acquaintance, I used to visit her at a few miles' distance: each time, it meant an expedition under the blazing August sun. To-day I find her at my door; we are intimate neighbours. The embrasure of the closed window provides an apartment of a mild temperature for the Pelopaeus. To enter her home, the Spider-huntress uses a little hole left open by accident in the shutters.
That he was able, later on, to narrate the wonderful history of the Pelopaeus, whose habits he had observed at Avignon, was due to the fact that this curious insect had come to lodge with him, having chosen Fabre's chamber for its dwelling.
Besides the Pelopaeus, there were three or four kinds of Trypoxylon, a genus also found in Europe, and which some naturalists have supposed to be parasitic, because the legs are not furnished with the usual row of strong bristles for digging, characteristic of the family to which it belongs.
Is the Pelopaeus devoid of judgment when she seeks the interior of dwelling-houses in order to shelter her nest of dried clay, which the least drop of rain would reduce to its original state of mud?
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