162 
Psyche 
[Sept.-Dee. 
NOTE ON THE HABITS OF OSMIA GEORGICA 
CRESSON 1 AS ASCERTAINED BY THE 
GLASS-TUBE METHOD 
By Carl G. Hartman, assisted by 
Paul and Philip Hartman and Carl Rettenmeyer 
In the summer of 1940, at “Holiday Heights” in Bethlehem, 
Conn., while amateurishly taking snap-shots and motion pic- 
tures of solitary bees and wasps, we were favored by visits of 
any number of individuals of Osmia georgica females to our 
glass-tube domiciles. We were able to observe, through the 
transparent walls of the tubes, the domestic activities of the bee, 
including the manner of making “bee-bread” and laying the egg 
upon the accumulated mass. Fabre used this method with 
Osmia tridentata , not so much for habit studies as to determine 
the sequence of the sexes of the offspring and the “control” of 
sex by the female according, as Fabre believed, to the conditions 
imposed by the experimenter — a line of investigation as sig- 
nificant today as it was forty years ago, when the senior author’s 
preceptor, Dr. William Morton Wheeler, first discussed the sub- 
ject with his students. 
As the writers find, in any of several books ( 1 ) on the life of 
the bee, no statement concerning the manner in which bee-bread 
is compounded, it seemed desirable to prepare a note on what we 
saw in our glass tubes of certain essential activities of this 
delightful little insect. 
Our Osmia worked in a glass tube having a bore of 4 to 5 
mm. — large enough to work in but too narrow for her to turn 
around. When the latter was necessary, as when changing from 
honey deposition to pollen brushing, after invariably trying at 
least once to turn around within the tube, she would back out, 
turn around at the entrance on our adhesive-type platform pro- 
vided for a landing place, and return tail first. This habit is 
mentioned by Fabre (2) also. It is probable that all tube-filling 
bees and wasps react to narrow passages in an identical manner, 
1 Thanks are due Dr. H. H. Ross, Illinois State Natural History Survey, 
Urbana, for kindly identifying the specimen. 
