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If the caterpillar's jaws open and threaten, the Ammophila stills them by biting the neck; if they are already growing quiescent, she refrains. Without being indispensable, this operation is useful at the moment of carting the prey. The caterpillar, too heavy to be carried on the wing, is dragged, head first, between the Ammophila's legs.
After witnessing flesh eating larvae at hundreds and hundreds of meals, I suddenly find myself confronted with a manner of eating that bears no relation to anything which I have seen before. I feel myself in a world that baffles my old experience. Let us recall the table manners of a larva living on prey, the Ammophila's for instance, when devouring its caterpillar.
The worm, moreover, stung in the greater number of its nerve-centres, lies on one side, motionless and incapable of bodily contortions or said an jerks of its hinder segments. If the mandibles try to snap, if the legs give a kick or two, they find nothing in front of them: the Ammophila's egg is at the opposite side.
I have sometimes even seen the three thoracic segments stung twice over: at the beginning of the attack and again when the Wasp returned to her vanquished prey. The Ammophila's triumphant transports beside her wounded and writhing victim are also subject to exceptions.
We fall back upon a special sense to explain the Ammophila's hunting; what can we fall back upon to account for this intuition of the future? Can the theory of chances play a part in the hazy problem? If nothing is logically arranged with a foreseen object, how is this clear vision of the invisible acquired? The capsules of Eumenes pomiformis are literally crammed with game.
Moreover, the question of health may well be involved. There is nothing to tell us that the Spider, that treat for the Pompilus, is not poison, or at least unwholesome food, to the Bembex, the lover of Gad-flies; that the Ammophila's succulent caterpillar is not repugnant to the stomach of the Sphex fed upon the dry Acridian.
It is exactly the same structure which we saw in the Ammophila's Grey Worm. My old notes give the following description of the caterpillars found in the nest of Eumenes Amedei: "a pale green or, less often, a yellowish body, covered with short white hairs; head wider than the front segment, dead-black and also bristling with hairs. Time and distance have not altered the nature of the provisions.
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