Jean-Henri Fabre

“ To make an opening in a slight barrier is not one of her methods. She could do it if she wished; for to gnaw through the ceiling of the cell on hatching and then through the general door of the nest is a more difficult job. She possesses in her mandibles a tool powerful enough for the purpose; but she is not aware that a splendid gallery lies beyond the obstacle. How did the Odynerus learn, if she did not know from the beginning, what the Osmia, with her greater experience of the reed, does not know? ”

“ The Mason-bee of the Sheds (Chalicodoma rufitarsis, Pérez) well deserves the name which I have felt justified in giving her from her habits: she settles in numerous colonies in our sheds, on the lower surface of the tiles, where she builds huge nests which endanger the solidity of the roof. Nowhere does the insect display a greater zeal for work than in one of these colossal cities, an estate which is constantly increasing as it passes down from one generation to another; nowhere does it find a better workshop for the exercise of its industry. ”

“ I take advantage of her absence to remove with my tweezers from the bottom of the cell the head of game and the egg. What will the insect do on its return, confronted with this empty cell, this cell no longer containing the egg, the sole object of her industry as a potter and her skill as a huntress?
The disappearance of the egg must be obvious to the Wasp who has been robbed of it, if her poor intelligence possess so much as the rudimentary gleam that enables us to distinguish between a thing’s presence and its absence. ”

“ Well, the Eumenes, who shares this passion for bright pebbles and empty Snail-shells, is the Bower-bird of the insect world; but she is a more practical collector, knows how to combine the useful and the ornamental and employs her discoveries in the construction of her nest, which is both a fortress and a museum. When she finds bits of translucent quartz, she rejects everything else: the building will be all the prettier for them. ”

“ The best mason among them, after she has erected her cells on a pebble, building them in the form of turrets daintily encrusted with bits of gravel, buries her artistic work under a clumsy plaster. Why do they both give this finish and devote such fastidious care to the frontage, when the masterpiece is doomed to disappear, deluged in mortar? We do not build a Louvre and then abandon its colonnades to the unclean trowel. But we must not press the analogy too far. What do insects care about the beauty or ugliness of an edifice, provided that the larva be comfortably housed? ”

“ It was close upon two o’clock; and in a few minutes the roll of the drum would summon me to display the properties of the Leyden jar to an audience of wool-gatherers. I was preparing to start, when I saw a strange, agile insect, with a slender body and a gourd-shaped abdomen slung at the end of a long thread, dart through the reek rising from the wash-tub. ”

“ Of the several insects that elect to make their home in our houses, certainly the most interesting, for the beauty of its shape, the singularity of its manners and the structure of its nests, is the Pelopæus, a Wasp hardly known even to the people whose fireside she frequents. Her solitary habits and her peaceful occupation of the premises explain why history is silent in her regard. She is so extremely retiring that her host is nearly always ignorant of her presence. Fame is for the noisy, the importunate, the noxious. ”

“ Not a Wasp stirs. Here is the nest facing us, hanging from the roof of the cavern.
At the bottom of the crypt, rounded like a basin, lie the dead and dying; I could pick them up by the handful. It looks as though the Wasps, when they feel their strength fail them, leave their dwelling and allow themselves to fall into the catacombs of the burrow. It may even be the duty of the able-bodied ones to cast the dead out of the nest. The paper tabernacle must not be defiled by corpses. ”

“ With mud collected from the edge of a pool, the huntress begins by building a turret ornamented with diagonal lozenges. Unhampered by its surroundings, this structure, the first of the group, is of a perfection that gives us a high opinion of the builder’s talent. It is fashioned like a segment of a twisted column. But other cells follow which, leaning one against the other, produce a mutual distortion. For the same reasons, namely, economy of material and general solidity, the beautiful ordonnance promised at the outset is wanting; crowding leads to irregularity. ”

“ Lastly, in the case of all these dwellings, the Mason-bee is man’s free tenant; her industry makes use of the products of our own industry. Can she have no other establishments? She has, beyond a doubt; she possesses some constructed on the ancient plan. On a stone the size of a man’s fist, protected by the shelter of a hedge, sometimes even on a pebble in the open air, I see her building now groups of cells as large as a walnut, now domes emulating in size, shape and solidity those of her rival, the Mason-bee of the Walls. ”

“ CHAPTER IX INSECT GEOMETRY
The industry of insects, especially that of the Bees and Wasps, abounds in tiny marvels. Newly manufactured with the cotton supplied by various fluff-covered plants, the nest of certain Anthidia forms an exquisitely graceful pouch. It is accurately fashioned, white as snow, pleasing to the eye and softer to the touch than Swan’s-down. The Humming-bird’s nest, a bowl hardly half the size of an apricot, is by comparison a piece of clumsy felt. ”

“ Without leaving the house in which I live, I can enumerate stone, wood, glass, metal, paint and mortar as forming the foundation of the nests. The green-house with its furnace heat in the summer and its bright light, equalling that outside, is fairly well-frequented. The Mason-bee hardly ever fails to build there each year, in squads of a few dozen, now on the glass panes, now on the iron bars of the framework. ”

“ The Wall-swallow, who is much less common than the other, never chooses a site within our houses for his structure. It must be outside for him and it must stand high, far removed from inquisitive eyes; but at the same time a shelter against the rain is indispensable, for the damp is almost as dangerous for his mud nest as for that of the Pelopæus. He therefore settles by choice under the eaves and cornices of buildings. He visits me every spring. ”

“ Constrained by the inexorable logic of the facts, I therefore state the deductions suggested by observation as follows: the insect is neither free nor conscious in its industry, which in its case is an external function with phases regulated almost as strictly as the phases of an internal function, such as digestion. It builds, weaves, hunts, stabs and paralyses, even as it digests, even as it secretes the poison of its sting, the silk of its cocoon or the wax of its combs, always without the least understanding of the means or the end. ”

“ Is the skilful paralysis which the Calicurgus practises upon the Tarantula, who keeps fresh for seven weeks, unknown to the Pelopæus, or is it impracticable in the fierceness of the attack? Are we, in her case, dealing not with a delicate practitioner, who is able to abolish movement without destroying life, but rather with a brutal sacrificer, who, to deprive her victims of their power of movement, kills them? ”

“ That the insect frequents our dwellings, that it builds a mud nest victualled with Spiders, that it weaves itself a bag which looks as it it were cut out of an onion-skin: all these details matter to us but little. They may please the collector who zealously sets down everything, down to the nervation of a wing, in order to throw a little light on his systematic arrangements; but the mind nourished with more serious ideas sees nothing in all this but the food of an almost puerile curiosity. ”

“ If he keep a certain distance, the stranger is tolerated, no matter what his race, his costume or his habits. If he pass near a Wasp, a threat warns him and puts him to flight. If he go to the pool of honey, when the refectory is already occupied by the Wasps, it seldom happens that the daring intruder is not molested and driven from the banquet. So far, blows of no great gravity suffice. But, if he have the misfortune to enter the actual nest, he comes to a bad end, pierced by the Wasps’ stings or at least disembowelled by the fangs of their mandibles. ”

“ Fate is favouring me beyond my desires: my [210] six captures belong to the Nest-building Odynerus and all the six are females. Any one passionately interested in a problem and suddenly discovering the data required for its solution will understand my emotion. The joy of the moment has its anxious side: who knows what turn things will take between the huntress and the quarry? I shift an Odynerus and a Chrysomela-larva into a bell-glass. To stimulate the assassin’s ardour, I set the glass cage in the sun. ”

“ To thwart this vigilance, the real enemies need to be masters of the art of stealthy immobility and cunning dissimulation. But there is no dissimulation about the Volucella-grub. It comes and goes, openly, wheresoever it will; it looks round amongst the Wasps for cells to suit it. What has it to make itself thus respected? Strength? Certainly not. It is a harmless creature, which the Wasp could rip open with a blow of her shears, while a touch of the sting would mean lightning death. It is a familiar guest, to whom no denizen of a Wasp’-nest bears ill-will. ”

“ Experience does not teach it; time does not awaken a glimmer in the darkness of its unconsciousness. Its art, perfect in its speciality, but inept in the face of the slightest new difficulty, is handed down immutably, as the art of the suction-pump is handed down to the babe at the breast. To expect the insect to alter the essential points of its industry is to hope that the babe will change its manner of sucking. ”

“ Good people, why not look into the early stages of the Wasp’s work? This is quite easy in the case of the Polistes, who builds in the open, on a twig of some hedge-plant. In the spring, when the Wasps’-nest is founded, the mother is alone. She is not surrounded by collaborators who, vying with her in zeal, would place partition against partition. She sets up her first prism. There is nothing to hamper her, nothing to impose one form upon her rather than another; and the original cell, free from contact in every direction, is as perfect an hexagonal prism as the rest will be. ”

“ So long as we confound acts of pure instinct and acts of discernment under the same head, we shall fall back into those endless discussions which embitter controversy without bringing us one step nearer to the solution of the problem. Is the insect conscious of what it does? Yes and no. No, if its action falls within the domain of instinct; yes, if the action falls within that of discernment. Are the habits of an insect capable of modification? ”

“ The Megachiles1 build their honey-jars with disks cut out of leaves; certain Anthidia make felted cotton wallets; others fashion pots out of resin. There you have instinct. Will any rash mind ever conceive the singular idea that the Leaf-cutter might very well have started working in cotton, that the cotton-wool-worker once thought or will one day think of cutting disks out of the leaves of the lilac- or the rose-tree, that the resin-kneader began with clay? Who would dare to indulge in such theories? Each Bee has her art, her medium, to which she strictly confines herself. ”

“ Let us next consider the Agenia, who rivals the Pelopæus as a huntress and a worker in clay. She encloses the one Spider who forms her larva’s ration in an [223] earthenware shell hardly as large as a cherry-stone and embellished on the outside with a tiny milled pattern. This little gem of ceramics is an ellipsoid truncated at one end. When the structure stands alone, its accuracy of form is perfect.
But the potter’s ware does not end with this. The place of refuge discovered in some crevice in a sunny wall is a valuable site, where the whole family will take up its abode. ”

“ The world’s great law which says that nothing edible shall be wasted provides for the consumption of a mere ball of hair disgorged by the Owl. How shall it be with the vast stores of a ruined Wasps’-nest! If they have not come yet, the consumers whose task it is to salve this abundant wreckage for nature’s markets, they will not tarry in coming and waiting for the manna that will soon [289] descend from above. That public granary, lavishly stocked by death, will become a busy factory of fresh life. ”

“ The females whose end is near are easily distinguished from the others by the disorder of their appearance. Their backs are dusty. Those who are hale and hearty, once they have taken their meal on the brim of the saucer of honey, settle in the sun and dust themselves without ceasing. There is an incessant brushing of the wings and abdomen, with gentle, sensitive extensions of the hind-legs; the fore-legs repeatedly stroke the head and the thorax. Thus the black-and-yellow costume is kept perfectly glossy. ”

“ The Hairy Ammophila gives her larva a single caterpillar, a large one, paralysed by as many pricks of her sting as it has nervous centres in its thorax and abdomen. Her surgical skill in subduing the monster is instinct, displayed in a form that quashes any inclination to see in it an acquired habit. In an art that can leave no one to practise it in the future unless that one be perfect at the outset, of what avail are lucky chances, atavistic tendencies, or the mellowing hand of time? ”

“ What effect will pure white produce? I sprinkle on the surface of the combs some larvæ that have lately left the egg. The tiny, snow-white grubs make for the nearest cells, go down into them, come out again and hunt about elsewhere. The Wasps peaceably let them go their way, as heedless of the little white [309] invaders as of the big red ones. Sometimes, when it enters an occupied cell, the little creature is seized by the owner, the Wasp-grub, which nabs it and turns it over and over in its mandibles. ”

“ I surprise one as she is crawling out of the nest. Lying on her back, she [264] stretches her limbs, twitches her abdomen and, after a few convulsions, lies absolutely still. I believe her dead. She is nothing of the sort. After a sun-bath, a sovran cordial, she recovers her legs again and goes back to the stack of combs. Yet the resuscitated Wasp is not saved. During the afternoon she is seized with a second fit, which this time leaves her really lifeless, with her legs in the air.
Death, if it be only the death of a Wasp, is always a solemn thing, worthy of our meditation. ”

“ Whether big or small, all the head of game are absolutely motionless. Armed with a magnifying-glass, I watch in vain for any oscillation of the palpi, any quivering of the tarsi, any pulsation of the abdomen, symptoms of life so frequently observed in the victims of the predatory Wasps. There is nothing, ever. Can the larvæ stabbed by the Odynerus be really dead? Can the provisions consist of actual corpses? By no means: their profound inertia does not preclude a remnant of life. ”

“ They yawn of their own accord at the least touch that I give to their cell. The lucky creatures have ever-ready stomachs.
Taking a piece of straw with a drop of honey hanging from it, I place the delicious ration between the grub’s mandibles. There is too much for a single mouthful. But the breast swells into a dewlap which catches the surplus. Here the grub will take a few more sips, at its leisure, after swallowing the spoonful which it received direct. When there is no more left, when the pectoral platter is licked clean, the swelling disappears and the larva resumes its immobility. ”