On the other side of the outworks of the fortification, the lid and
barricade, are the cells set more or less far down in the spiral,
according to the diameter of the shell. They are bounded back and
front by partitions of pure resin, without any encrustations of mineral
particles. Their number is exceedingly restricted and is usually limited
to two. The front room, which is larger because the width of the passage
goes on increasing, is the abode of a male, superior in size to the
other sex; the less spacious back room contains a female. I have already
drawn attention in an earlier chapter to the wonderful problem submitted
for our consideration by this breaking up of the laying into couples
and this alternation of the males and females. Without calling for other
work than the transverse partitions, the broadening stairway of the
Snail-shell thus furnishes both sexes with house-room suited to their
size.
The second Resin-bee that inhabits shells, Anthidium bellicosum, hatches
in July and works during the fierce heat of August. Her architecture
differs in no wise from that of her kinswoman of the springtime, so much
so that, when we find a tenanted Snail-shell in a hole in the wall or
under the stones, it is impossible to decide to which of the two species
the nest belongs. The only way to obtain exact information is to break
the shell and split the cocoons in February, at which time the nests
of the summer Resin-bee are occupied by larvae and those of the spring
Resin-bee by the perfect insect. If we shrink from this brutal
method, we are still in doubt until the cocoons open, so great is the
resemblance between the two pieces of work.
In both cases, we find the same lodging, Snail-shells of every size and
every kind, just as they happen to come; the same resin lid, the inside
gritty with tiny bits of stone, the outside almost smooth and
sometimes ornamented with little shells; the same barricade--not always
present--of various kinds of rubbish; the same division into two rooms
of unequal size occupied by the two sexes. Everything is identical, down
to the purveyor of the gum, the brown-berried juniper. To say more about
the nest of the summer Resin-bee would be to repeat oneself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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