[4] Cf. Bramble-bees and Others: chaps. iii. and iv.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEST-BUILDING ODYNERUS
If further proofs than those submitted elsewhere were needful, to demonstrate that the organ does not imply the function, that the implement does not determine the work,[1] the Odynerus group would furnish us with very remarkable evidence. With a close similarity of organization, not only in the details but also in the aggregate, a similarity which makes these insects one of the most natural genera in respect of structure, they possess a great variety of industries, bearing no relation one to the other, though carried on with the same equipment. Apart from the likeness in form, one single characteristic unites this group, whose habits are so unlike: all the Odyneri are game-hunters; they victual their families with grubs paralysed with the sting, with little caterpillars and small Beetle-larvæ.
But to achieve this common end, the larder furnished with its egg and stuffed [[177]]with game, how many several methods of construction! If we were better-acquainted with the biology of the genus, we should perhaps find architects of almost as many different schools as there are species. My investigations, which were dependent on opportunity, have as yet borne upon only three of the Odyneri; and these three, with the same implement, the curved, toothed pincers of their mandibles, apply themselves to the most dissimilar industries.
One of them, O. reniformis, whose work I have described in an earlier chapter, digs a deep gallery in a hard soil and with the rubbish constructs, at the mouth of her well, a sort of curved chimney, with a guilloche pattern, the materials of which are afterwards again employed to close the abode. Formerly, when I made her acquaintance in front of a steep loamy bank baked by the sun, I whiled away the long hours of waiting by conversing, turn and turn about, with the Hoopoe, who taught me how to pronounce Latin, and with my Dog, who, lying in the shade of a leafy thicket, cooling his belly in the moist sand, taught me how to practise patience. The Wasp was rare and by no means prodigal of her returns to the nest where I was watching her skilful tactics. [[178]]Nowadays, every spring, I have a populous colony of her before my eyes in one of the paths of my enclosure. When the period for the works arrives, I surround the hamlet with stakes to mark the site, lest heedless footsteps should destroy the pretty chimneys built of grains of earth.
The second, O. alpestris, Sauss., is by trade a resin-worker. Possessing the same tool as her colleague the miner, but not the same skill, she does not dig herself a dwelling; she prefers to settle down in borrowed lodgings provided by an empty Snail-shell. The shells of Helix nemoralis, of H. aspersa,[2] when very incompletely developed, and of Bulimulus radiatus are the only dwellings that I have known her to occupy and also the only ones that would serve her turn under the stone-heaps where, in company with Anthidium bellicosum, she performs her labours in July and August.
Saved by the Snail from the hard task of excavation, she specializes in mosaic and produces a work of art which is superior in elegance to the miner’s temporary guilloche. Her materials are, on the one hand, resin; on the other, little bits of gravel. Her method is very unlike that of the two resin-workers [[179]]who find a lodging in the shell of the Edible Snail. These two swamp with gum, on the outer surface of the lid, their coarse, angular bricks, which are unequal in size, variable in nature and often of a half-earthy character, so that the unevenness of the work, in which the pieces are laid side by side at random, is hidden under a coat of resin. On the inner surface the gum does not fill the gaps and the cemented fragments appear with all their irregular projections and their clumsy arrangement. Remember also that the bits of gravel are kept exclusively for the operculum, or lid, the final covering; the partitions which mark off the cells are made entirely of resin, without any mineral particles.
The Alpine Odynerus works on a different plan: she saves pitch by making better use of stone. A number of round, flinty atoms are set in a bed of still sticky cement, on the outer surface. They fit one against the other, are almost all of the same size, that of a pin’s head, and are selected singly by the artist amid the miscellaneous rubbish that litters the ground. When it is well-executed, as is frequently the case, the result suggests a piece of embroidery worked with roughly-fashioned beads of [[180]]quartz. The Anthidia of the Snail-shell, rude labourers that they are, accept all that falls to their mandibles: angular splinters of limestone, morsels of flint, bits of shell, hard particles of earth; the daintier Odynerus as a rule inlays with beads of flint only. Can this taste for gems be due to the brilliancy, the translucency, the polish of the grain? Can it be that the insect takes pleasure in its casket of precious stones? The answer will be the same as in the case of the ornamental rose-window, the tiny shell sometimes inserted in the centre of the lid by the two resin-gatherers who inhabit the shell of the Edible Snail: why not?