While this point escapes me, another of higher interest appears most
plainly; and that is the large amount of resinous material used in a
single nest, especially in that of Anthidium quadrilobum, in which I
have counted as many as twelve cells. The nest of the Mason-bee of
the Pebbles is hardly more massive. For so costly an establishment,
therefore, the Resin-bee collects her pitch on the dead pine as
copiously as the Mason-bee collects her mortar on the macadamized
road. Her workshop no longer shows us the niggardly partitioning of a
Snail-shell with two or three drops of resin; what we see is the whole
building of the house, from the basement to the roof, from the thick
outer walls to the partitions of the rooms. The cement expended would
be enough to divide hundreds of Snail-shells, wherefore the title of
Resin-bee is due first and foremost to this master-builder in pitch.
Honourable mention should be awarded to A. Latreillii, who rivals
her fellow-worker as far as her smaller stature permits. The other
manipulators of resin, those who build partitions in Snail-shells, come
third, a very long way behind.
And now, with the facts to support us, let us philosophize a little.
We have here, recognized as of excellent standard by all the expert
classifiers, so fastidious in the arrangement of their lists, a generic
group, called Anthidium, containing two guilds of workers entirely
dissimilar in character: the cotton-fullers and the resin-kneaders. It
is even possible that other species, when their habits are better known,
will come and increase this variety of manufactures. I confine myself to
the little that I know and ask myself in what the manipulator of cotton
differs from the manipulator of resin as regards tools, that is to
say, organs. Certainly, when the genus Anthidium was set down by
the classifiers, they were not wanting in scientific precision: they
consulted, under the lens of the microscope, the wings, the mandibles,
the legs, the harvesting-brush, in short, all the details calculated
to assist the proper delimitation of the group. After this minute
examination by the experts, if no organic differences stand revealed,
the reason is that they do not exist. Any dissimilarity of structure
could not escape the accurate eyes of our learned taxonomists. The
genus, therefore, is indeed organically homogeneous; but industrially it
is thoroughly heterogeneous. The implements are the same and the work is
different.
That eminent Bordeaux entomologist, Professor Jean Perez, to whom I
communicated the misgivings aroused in my mind by the contradictory
nature of my discoveries, thinks that he has found the solution of the
difficulty in the conformation of the mandibles. I extract the following
passage from his volume, "Les Abeilles":
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account