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As the old nests are utilized by the Mason so long as they are not too much dilapidated, the dome which has just been vacated by the Leucopsis, now more than a year old, has its other cells occupied by the Bee's children. There is here, without seeking farther, a fat living for the Leucopsis' offspring which she well knows how to turn to profit.
As a matter of fact, I notice, with extreme surprise, that the great majority of the cells visited by the Leucopsis' probe do not contain the one thing which the insect is seeking, namely, the young larva of the Mason-bee enclosed in its cocoon.
In those aerial nests, swinging at the end of a twig, not a Dioxys, a Stelis, an Anthrax, a Leucopsis, those dread ravagers of the other two Masons; never any Osmiae, Megachiles or Anthidia, those lodgers in the old buildings. The absence of the latter is easily explained. The Chalicodoma's masonry does not last long on its frail support.
It is a repetition of what the Anthrax has shown us, with this difference, that the Leucopsis seems not so well skilled in the delicate work of absorbing the victim. Instead of the clean white granule which is the sole residue when the Fly has finished her joint, the insect with the long probe has a plateful of leavings, not seldom soiled with the brownish tinge of food that has gone bad.
All solitary though she be on her boulder, which would seem the proper thing to keep away exploiters, the scourge of dense populations, the Chalicodoma of the Pebbles is no less sorely tried. My notes abound in cases such as the following: of the nine cells in one dome, three are occupied by the Anthrax, two by the Leucopsis, two by the Stelis, one by the Chalcis and the ninth by the Mason.
The Leucopsis' egg is not even laid upon the Mason-bee's larva; it is hung by its bent pedicle to the fibrous wall of the cocoon. When I go to work very delicately, so as not to disturb the arrangement in knocking the nest off its support, and then extract and open the cocoon, I see the egg swinging from the silken vault. But it takes very little to make it fall.
Thus it describes as parasites the Chrysis, the Mutilla, the Anthrax, the Leucopsis, all of whom feed their family not on the provisions amassed by others, but on the very larvae which have consumed those provisions, their actual property.
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