Musée Entomologique: Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa morio), 1878 – Art Mug

A carpenter bee crosses the frame on rust-red wings, its body a blue-black so deep the engraver left the paper bare to model it. Around it a passionflower vine in fine hatching, a tendril curling into a spiral, and at the right the trunk of a dead tree — the material the bee is named for. Carpenter bees do not build, they bore: they cut galleries into standing dead wood, and the genus name says so. Xylocopa is Greek for wood-cutter.

The sheet is Hyménoptères — Pl. VII from the Musée entomologique illustré, the three-volume natural history that Jules Rothschild published in Paris between 1876 and 1878; this plate belongs to volume three, Les Insectes. The full plate sets four bees on one passionflower — beside Xylocopa morio three tropical American species: Chrysantheda frontalis, Euglossa romandi and Centris denudans. This mug takes the upper part alone: the carpenter bee, its vine and its tree. The fourth product image shows the whole sheet with the printed part marked, so the crop is visible for what it is.

The plates are wood engravings, coloured by hand one copy at a time, so no two are quite alike. What you see is the colouring of one particular copy — the one in the Dr. Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection at the University of Alberta. Nothing has been repainted. The yellowing of the paper has been balanced out and the tone opened so that the engraved line carries on white porcelain; the hatching, the colour and the silhouette are as the sheet has them.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Musée entomologique illustré, vol. 3, Les Insectes, Paris: J. Rothschild, 1878, plate Hyménoptères — Pl. VII, upper detail. Hand-coloured wood engraving. Digitised from the copy in the Dr. Ronald B. Madge Entomology Collection, University of Alberta Libraries, and made available through the Internet Archive and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.