Snail-shell

Since there are heaps of stone there, she probably has no other dwelling than the Snail-shell.

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

A single Snail-shell contains room for six or eight cells.

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

Scattered also here and there among the monuments of antiquity are heaps of refuse, accumulations of broken stones in which various Hymenoptera, including the Three-horned Osmia in particular, take possession of the dead Snail-shell.

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

We see this especially in the third case, where the presence of a solitary female in a family of twenty-six is due to the somewhat larger diameter of the corresponding Snail-shell and also, no doubt, to some mistake on the mother's part, for the female cocoon, in a series of two, occupies the upper storey, the one next to the orifice, an arrangement which the

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

Would one who knew nothing of the Osmia save her home in the Snail-shell expect to see her accept as her dwelling a stump of reed, a paper funnel, a glass tube?

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

Some, it is true, take up their quarters in the Snail-shell; but even among these a goodly number refuse my new shells and return to their birth-place, the old Snail-shell, in order to utilize the family property, without much labour, at the cost of a few repairs.

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

All, down to the common Snail-shell, are constructed according to logarithmic laws.

The Life of the Spider Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

We find it in the arrangement of the scales of a fir-cone, as in the arrangement of an Epeira's limy web; we find it in the spiral of a Snail-shell, in the chaplet of a Spider's thread, as in the orbit of

The Life of the Spider Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

The faithful adherents of the Snail-shell were in the minority.

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869

Snail-shell, in the immediate neighbourhood of the first, to a third, a fourth and others still, always close to one another, until her ovaries were emptied.

Bramble-Bees and Others Jean-Henri Fabre 1869