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Immediately afterwards down came a north wind and put nature under its thumb for two months; the drone-fly hid himself, the bees went home, everything became shrivelled, dry, inhuman.
This bird was hunted from every spot he chose to alight on; no sooner did he enter the garden than one of the stronger birds flew at him 'so misery is trodden on by many. There was a drone-fly on a sunny wall on January 20, the commonest of flies in summer, quite a wonder then; the same day a house-sparrow was trying to sing, for they have a song as well as a chirp; on January 22 a tit was sharpening his saw and the gnats were jumping up and down in crowds this up-and-down motion seems peculiar to them and may-flies.
During the night the Segestria, whose habits are nocturnal, has recovered her daring and stabbed her enemy. I had my suspicions that the parts played might be reversed! The butcher of yesterday is the victim of to-day. I replace the Pompilus by a Hive-bee. The interview is not protracted. Two hours later, the Bee is dead, bitten by the Spider. A Drone-fly suffers the same fate.
Newport, experimenting, it is true, under conditions very different from mine, since his observations related to young Meloes held captive in a glass jar, while mine were made in the normal circumstances, Newport, I was saying, saw Meloes fasten to the body of a Malachius and stay there without moving, which inclines me to believe that with Beetles I should have obtained the same results as, for instance, with a Drone-fly.
A few successive frosts chilled the sap in the trees and the bushes near the river, but were succeeded by a long period when the air was crisp yet balmy, and not a breath of wind was noticeable except by the birds and the squirrels high among the giant beeches around the old garden, and when the murmur of summer insects was never heard by night, and only by day if a chance drone-fly or humble-bee visited a surviving clump of yellow ragweed by the run-way close to Brighteye's burrow.
The death of the Drone-fly, entangled in the silken funnel, is reproduced by the sudden death of the Bumble-bee on entering the Tarantula's burrow. We know the effect of the poison on man, thanks to Antoine Duges' investigations. She was three-quarters of an inch long, measured from the mandibles to the spinnerets.
It was certainly not the excitable but pacific Drone-fly; it was one of the Bees, who struck home by accident during the thick of the fight. Where and how? I cannot tell. The incident occurs only once in my notes, but it throws a light upon the question. The Bee is capable of withstanding her adversary; she can then and there slay her would-be slayer with a thrust of the sting.
Thanks to this method and these hunting-appliances an ambush at the bottom of a silken whirlpool, radiating snares, a life-line which holds her from behind and allows her to take a sudden rush without risking a fall the Segestria is able to catch game less inoffensive than the Drone-fly. A Common Wasp, they tell me, does not daunt her.
Now and again humble-bees go by with a burr; and it is curious to see the largest of them all, the big bombus, hanging to the little green gooseberry blossom. Hive-bees, too, are abroad with every stray gleam of sun; and perhaps now and then a drone-fly last seen on the blossoms of the ivy in November.
Bitten at the back of the head, the Drone-fly is dead in a moment; and the Segestria carries him into her lair.
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