The MALE differs in having “the sixth segment of the _abdomen_ emarginate, and with a strong tooth on each side; the terminal segment emarginate, thus producing two strong, lateral, obtuse teeth, the ventral plates of these same segments emarginate at the extremity, and the emargination fringed with hair; the claws bifid.”
1. _papaveris_, Latreille. (Plate XIV. fig. 2 ♂♀.)
Named by St. Fargeau from _ανθος_, a _flower_, and _κοπὴ_, a _cutting_ or _incision_, from its habit of cutting sections out of the petals of the common scarlet poppy with which to line the cells it forms within the cylinder it excavates, just as _Megachile_ does with the leaves of various plants. It is noticed as British upon the faith of the specimens introduced by Leach into the cabinets of the British Museum and presumptively caught in the west or south-west of England, a region rich in rarities. Rennie in fact tells us that he has found it at Largs, in Scotland. One of Leach’s specimens I received in exchange from that establishment in 1842, and which is now in the possession of Mr. Desvignes, to whom my collections passed in the following year. This genus forms a sort of combination between the genera _Megachile_ and _Osmia_, it having the upholstering habits of the former in the mode with which it lines its nest, and the general habit of the latter. At a first glance, before its habits were known or its structure examined, even an experienced entomologist might have placed it under _Osmia_, as an unrecognised species, for it very strongly resembles the _Osmia leucomelana_. This proves how very inconclusive habit is as an index to habits, the latter of these insects drilling into the pith of brambles, and the _Anthocopa_ tunnelling cylinders into the hardest trodden roads or pathways and lining them with its crimson hangings.
From the extreme rarity of the insect, I have been unable to examine the cibarial apparatus, and thence to ascertain upon what substantial grounds the generic distinctions are based, which separate it from _Osmia_. Whether it was these mere habits of the insect which induced Le Pelletier de St. Fargeau to establish the genus I do not know, but he is always extremely slovenly, and therefore very unsatisfactory in his characteristics, which are never framed in a strictly explicit manner. In consequence of all these difficulties, I have merely been able under the generic character to introduce such as he has given, which I could not derive from the personal external inspection of Mr. Desvignes’ female (my own selection of whose bees for the purposes of this work he has been so kind as to lend me, and whom I thus publicly present with my best thanks). I have therefore compounded a character as well as I could from St. Fargeau’s descriptions, inserted in the tenth volume of the ‘_Encyclopédie Méthodique_,’ and from his work on the _Hymenoptera_, forming one of the ‘_Suites à Buffon_.’