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Updated: May 5, 2025
It was to solve this question and some others connected with it that I undertook, for the second time, to rear the Three-horned Osmia in my study. The problem on this occasion is a more delicate one; but I am also better-equipped.
The retreat selected is divided into chambers by partition-walls, after which the entrance to the dwelling receives a massive seal. That is the sum-total of the building done. For this plasterer's rather than mason's work, the Horned and the Three-horned Osmia employ soft earth.
If, however, during the spring, an old, disused hurdle is left out of doors, in a horizontal position, the Three-horned Osmia often takes possession of it and makes use of the two ends, where the reeds lie truncated and open.
I refuse to go to this length in my conjectures, not that instinct seems to me incapable of such feats, but because of the particulars obtained from the three-horned Osmia and the two mason bees. In the cells of these three species, I see the number of larvae put out to nurse vary in so elastic a fashion that I must abandon all idea of proportionate adjustment.
Two species have come hurrying up to take part in the joys of the almond-tree: first, the Horned Osmia, clad in black velvet on the head and breast, with red velvet on the abdomen; and, a little later, the Three-horned Osmia, whose livery must be red and red only.
More or less stocked with cells, the reed is at last closed, right at the orifice, with a thick plug of cotton, usually coarser than the wadding of the honey-satchels. It is the equivalent of the Three-horned Osmia's barricade of mud, of the leaf-putty of Latreille's Osmia, of the Megachiles' barrier of leaves cut into disks.
Thus Latreille's Osmia, together with the Three-horned Osmia, uses the spacious structures of the Mason-bee of the Sheds; she likes the magnificent cells of the Masked Anthophora; and she is always ready to establish herself in the cylinder of any reed lying flat on the ground. "The Mason-bees": chapter 10.
Until they show me one, the theorists will only make me smile when they talk to me of erstwhile workers relinquishing their trade to become parasitic sluggards. I also call, with no less insistence, for a descendant of the Three-horned Osmia, a descendant given to demolishing party-walls.
If he is a trifle smaller, it is scarcely noticeable, whereas, in the Horned Osmia and the Three-horned Osmia, the male is only half or a third the size of the female, as we have seen from the respective bulk of their cocoons. In the Mason-bee of the Walls there is also a difference in size, though less pronounced.
We know that the Three-horned Osmia prefers to haunt the habitations of the Bees who nidify in populous colonies, such as the Mason-bee of the Sheds and the Hairy-footed Anthophora. Exercising the very greatest care, I broke up some great lumps of earth removed from the banks inhabited by the Anthophora and sent to me from Carpentras by my dear friend and pupil M. Devillario.
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