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Updated: June 5, 2025
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.
Well, the small cocoons, those in the narrow front cells, with their scanty store of provisions, all belong to males; the big cocoons, those in the spacious and well-stocked cells at the back, all belong to females. The conclusion is definite: the laying of the Three-horned Osmia consists of two distinct groups, first a group of females and then a group of males.
That would be superlatively clever. Let us consult the Three-horned Osmia in her glass tubes. The Osmia is working at her big partition, with her body outside the cell which she is preparing. From time to time, with a pellet of mortar in her mandibles, she goes in and touches the previous ceiling with her forehead, while the tip of her abdomen quivers and feels the pad in course of construction.
Indeed, at the end, I find myself with handfuls of cocoons of the Three-horned Osmia. To count them would weary my patience without serving any particular purpose. I spread out my stock in a large open box on a table which receives a bright diffused light but not the direct rays of the sun. The table stands between two windows facing south and overlooking the garden.
This gives the Three-horned Osmia a handsome collection of tenements; and she does not fail to profit by them. Then again, even if the Field-mouse's conchological museum be lacking, the same broken stones serve as a refuge for Garden-snails who come to live there and end by dying there.
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.
I will pass on and come to the brutal fact, the real sledge-hammer blow. Towards the end of the Bee's operations, in the first week of June, the last acts of the Three-horned Osmia become so exceptionally interesting that I made her the object of redoubled observation. The swarm at this time is greatly reduced in numbers.
The failure is easily explained. The partitions and the closing-plug of the Horned and of the Three-horned Osmia are made, as we have seen, of a sort of mud which water instantly reduces to pap. With the upright position of the reeds, the stopper of the opening would receive the rain and would become diluted; the ceilings of the storeys would fall in and the family would perish by drowning.
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.
In short, my pan-pipe hives, though very useful to me from other points of view, taught me nothing about the order of the sexes among the Leaf-cutters and the cotton-weavers. One of them, the Three-horned Osmia, did better still: as I have described, she built her nests in my study, as plentifully as I could wish, using reeds, glass tubes and other retreats of my selecting for her galleries.
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