letting them emerge in their natal nests) discourage females from selecting a nesting site near their natal nest. A female might inspect several potential nests before settling in. Once she has found the right nest, she flies outside of the hole and does an in-flight dance. She is orienting on major visual features in order to find her nest when she returns from foraging.
O. lignaria arrange their nest as a series of partitions, with one egg per partition. She begins the process by collecting mud and building the back wall of the first partition. Then she makes trips to nearby flowers. Unlike honey bees which visit flowers that are miles away, she prefers flowers that are nearest the nest. She can visit 75 flowers per trip, and it takes 25 trips to create a complete pollen/nectar provision. She works tirelessly during the day, only stopping once the sun has gone down. When the sun rises the next morning, she will bask in its rays until she is warm enough to fly. Then she continues where ever she left off the day before.
Once the provision is complete, she backs into the hole and lays an egg on top of it. She collects more mud to seal off the partition. The new wall also doubles as the back wall of the next cell. She continues until she has filled the nest hole. O. lignara, like many insects, can select the gender of the egg they lay by fertilizing the egg, or not. Unfertilized eggs are males, while fertilized eggs are females. The adult bee lays female eggs in the back of the burrow, and the male eggs towards the front. She lays about three males to every nest hole depending on depth.
When the egg hatches, the larva consumes the food provision as it goes through many changes on its way to becoming an adult. It will spend most of its life alone in this dark cell made by its mother.
Once the female has finished the nest, she plugs the entrance with one thick mud wall. Then she seeks out another location for a new nest. She works tirelessly until she dies. An O. lignaria female lives for about four to eight weeks an