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As far as I can judge from the dissection of the specimen preserved in alcohol, whose viscera were affected by being kept too long in that liquid, the nervous system consists of eleven ganglia, not counting the oesophageal collar; and the digestive apparatus does not differ perceptibly from that of an adult Oil-beetle.
On the other hand, I knew from Léon Dufour that the little yellow animal, the Louse found in the Bee's down, had been recognized, thanks to Newport's investigations, as the larva of the Oil-beetle.
With both Mylabres, the batch consists of some forty eggs, a very small number compared with those of the Oil-beetle and the Sitaris. This limited family was already foreseen, judging by the short space of time which the egg-layer spends in her underground lodging.
This is the creature's blood. The English, because of its trick of discharging oily blood when on the defensive, call this insect the Oil-beetle. It would not be a particularly interesting Beetle save for its metamorphoses and the peregrinations of its larva, which are similar in every respect to those of the larva of the Sitares.
Remember that the primary larva of the Oil-beetle, for instance, settles on any insect that happens to pay a momentary visit to the flower in which the tiny creature is on the look-out.
It is nevertheless very remarkable to find in the Blister-beetles, on both sides of the Atlantic, this weakness for the flavour of Locust: one devours her eggs; the other a representative of the order, in the shape of the Praying Mantis and her kin. Who will explain to me this predilection for the Orthopteron in a tribe whose chief, the Oil-beetle, accepts nothing but the mess of honey?
We no longer have to do with the puny louse of the Oil-beetle, which lies in ambush on a cichoriaceous blossom in order to slip into the fleece of a harvesting Bee; nor with the black atom of the Sitaris, which swarms in a heap on the spot where it is hatched, at the Anthophora's door. I see the young Mylabris striding eagerly up and down the glass tube in which it was born. What is it seeking?
We now understand how it is that these young larvæ have been observed upon a host of different insects and especially upon the early Flies and Bees pillaging the flowers; we can also understand the need for that prodigious number of eggs laid by a single Oil-beetle, since the vast majority of the larvæ which come out of them will infallibly go astray and will not succeed in reaching the cells of the Anthophoræ.
The primary larva of the Mylabris therefore does not imitate those of the Sitaris and the Oil-beetle; it does not settle in the fleece of its host to get itself carried to the cell crammed with victuals. The task of seeking and finding the heap of food falls upon its own shoulders. The small number of the eggs that constitute a batch also leads to the same conclusion.
It presents no peculiarities. The only nymph that I have reared attained the perfect insect state at the end of September. Under ordinary conditions would the adult Oil-beetle have emerged from her cell at this period? I do not think so, since the pairing and egg-laying do not take place until the beginning of spring.
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