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Despite the presence of Meloe cicatricosus in the dwellings of the Mason-bee, which I so often ransacked in compiling the history of the Sitares, I never saw this insect, at any season of the year, wandering on the perpendicular soil, at the entrance of the corridors, for the purpose of laying its eggs there, as the Sitares do; and I should know nothing of the details of the egg-laying if Godart, de Geer and, above all, Newport had not informed us that the Oil-beetles lay their eggs in the earth.
The larvæ of Meloë and Sitaris in their fully grown condition possess the caterpillar form, but the new born larvæ of these genera show the Campodea form. He considers that the caterpillar form is a degraded Campodea form, the result of its stationary life in plants or in wood. For reasons which we will not pause here to discuss, we have always regarded the eruciform type of larva as the highest.
And who shall say whether the Meloe, in its turn, will not be dispossessed by a fresh thief; or even whether it will not, in the state of a drowsy, fat and flabby larva, fall a prey to some marauder who will munch its live entrails?
And now he was determined, if it cost him the effort of all his remaining days, to close another discussion and put forever to rest the anxious doubts about the larva of meloe. Your thirty-six dissections must have cost you a deal of time and labor, the Master said. What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor? answered the Scarabee. -It is my meat and drink to work over my beetles.
And wherever he travels a band of music goes with him, for this hum which wanders by us is doubtless to him a vast and inspiring strain of melody. I thought all this, while the Scarabee supposed I was studying the minute characters of the enigmatical specimen. I know what I consider your pediculus melittae, I said at length. Do you think it really the larva of meloe?
I wish to settle the point once for all whether the Pediculus Mellitae is or is not the larva of Meloe. Here is a fellow-creature of mine and yours who is asked to see all the glories of the firmament brought close to him, and he is too busy with a little unmentionable parasite that infests the bristly surface of a bee to spare an hour or two of a single evening for the splendors of the universe!
The Sitares, entrusting their eggs to the very corridors through which the Anthophora is bound to pass, spare their larvæ a host of dangers which the larvæ of the Meloe have to run, for these, born far from the dwellings of the Bees, are obliged to make their own way to their hymenopterous foster-parents.
It remains for us to learn how the Meloe leaves the down of the Bee which has carried it, in order to enter the cell. With larvæ collected from the bodies of different Bees, before I was fully acquainted with the tactics of the Sitares, I undertook, as Newport had done before me, certain investigations intended to throw light on this leading point in the Oil-beetle's history.
A., on variation in the skulls of the natives of America. Meinecke, on the numerical proportion of the sexes in butterflies. Melanesians, decrease of. Meldola, Mr., colours and marriage flight of Colias and Pieris. Meliphagidae, Australian, nidification of. Melita, secondary sexual characters of. Meloe, difference of colour in the sexes of a species of. Memnon, young.
The young Meloe leaves the down of the Bee at the moment when the egg is laid; and, since contact with the honey would be fatal to the grub, it must, in order to save itself, adopt the tactics followed by the Sitaris, that is to say, it must allow itself to drop on the surface of the honey with the egg which is in the act of being laid.
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