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Updated: May 10, 2025
When we see Three-horned Osmiae enter the crevices of old walls and of stone-heaps, there is no doubt about their occupation: they are getting free lodgings out of the old Snail-shells of those labyrinths. The Horned Osmia, who is less common, might easily also be less ingenious, that is to say, less rich in varieties of houses. She seems to scorn empty shells.
Capped with brown crust, falling bluff inland, and sloping towards the main, where the usual stone-heaps act as sea-marks, this bank of yellowish-white coralline, measuring 310 metres by half that width, may be the remains of the bed in which the torrents carved out the port.
From their very childhood the Coreans are imbued with horrid and fantastic accounts of the doings of these spirits, and so vividly are the usual habits of these ghostly creatures depicted to them, that they cannot but remain for ever indelibly impressed on their minds. Another very common sight, besides the stone-heaps, are the sacred trees.
So they went on their ways, and fared very warily when they were gotten beyond those parts of the wood which they knew well. By this time they were strung out in a long line; and they noted their road carefully, blazing the trees on either side when there were trees, and piling up little stone-heaps where the trees failed them.
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.
Two little sticks or twigs, placed crosswise and held to their place by a rock or stone, serve the same purpose in case of emergency. Such accumulations of rocks, little stone-heaps, are plentiful around Indian villages; and they represent votive offerings, symbolizing as many prayers.
It usually contents itself with half a dozen stalks of dry grass and a few long hairs from a cow's tail loosely arranged on the branch of an apple-tree. The rough-winged swallow builds in the wall and in old stone-heaps, and I have seen the robin build in similar localities. Others have found its nest in old, abandoned wells.
Two Anthidia of my district, A. septemdentatum, LATR., and A. bellicosum, LEP., adopt as the home of their offspring the empty shells of different snails: Helix aspersa, H. algira, H. nemoralis, H. caespitum. The first-named, the Common Snail, is the most often used, under the stone-heaps and in the crevices of old walls. Both Anthidia colonize only the second whorl of the spiral.
"I'll resk him when once I get these two bread-hooks on him. And he can't smell me through the mouse-nests either." That night we set ourselves to put the stratagem in operation. With the dusk we stole out into the field where the stone-heaps were, and where we had oftenest heard foxes bark.
Their sharp, cur-like barks used often to rouse us, and of a dark evening we would hear them out in the fields, "mousing" around the stone-heaps, making a queer, squeaking sound like a mouse, to call the real mice out of their grass nests inside the stone-heaps. This, indeed, is a favorite trick of Reynard. We owned a flock of thirty-one turkeys.
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