Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
We see this especially in the third case, where the presence of a solitary female in a family of twenty-six is due to the somewhat larger diameter of the corresponding Snail-shell. There would still remain the inverse permutation: to obtain only females and no males, or very few. The first permutation makes the second seem very probable, although I cannot as yet conceive a means of realizing it.
When, therefore, the Sparrow still from time to time indulges in spherical building, this is not progress on his part, as is sometimes contended; it is, on the contrary, a retrogression, a return to the ancient customs, so prodigal of labour. He is behaving like the Osmia who, in default of a reed, makes shift with a Snail-shell, which is more difficult to utilize but easier to find.
It was soft, plastic, well-suited for the partitioning of the Snail-shell; it soon hardened into a solid ceiling. The Bee tried the resinous gum and benefited by it. Her successors also benefited by it, especially after improving it. Little by little, the rubble-work of the lid and of the gravel barricade was invented: an enormous improvement, of which the race did not fail to take advantage.
How did the work of man's pruning-knife bring about the abandonment of the natural lodging? How was the spiral staircase of the Snail-shell replaced by the cylindrical gallery of the reed? Was the change from one kind of house to another effected by gradual transitions, by attempts made, abandoned, resumed, becoming more and more definite in their results as generation succeeded generation?
Her workshop no longer shows us the niggardly partitioning of a Snail-shell with two or three drops of resin; what we see is the whole building of the house, from the basement to the roof, from the thick outer walls to the partitions of the rooms.
Could one who knew nothing of the Sparrow but her nest under the eaves suspect the ball-shaped nest at the top of a tree? Would one who knew nothing of the Osmia save her home in the Snail-shell expect to see her accept as her dwelling a stump of reed, a paper funnel, a glass tube?
She has very little of that crawling backwards to do when she has a Snail-shell for the home of her eggs and scarcely any when the home is the cell of the Mason-bee. Moreover, as the stack of cocoons numbers two or three at most, the deliverance will be exempt from the difficulties attached to a long series.
The little monster swam slowly by the motion of its long and strong legs, thrusting out two short, hornlike antennæ over the top of its mask. It seemed to be eyeing a snail-shell on a stem above, and waiting for the snail's soft body to emerge from the citadel; when on a sudden, through the stems, it caught sight of the basking tadpole.
Some of them were occupied on the first few days of the laying; and the Osmia who had started with a home of this sort would pass next to a second Snail-shell, in the immediate neighbourhood of the first, to a third, a fourth and others still, always close to one another, until her ovaries were emptied.
An inlayer, like her colleagues of the Snail-shell, she gathers any hard granule near at hand capable of strengthening her work; and the dried skulls of Ants, which are frequent around about her abode, are in her eyes building-stones of equal value to the pebbles. One and all employ whatever they can find without much seeking.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking