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Updated: June 23, 2025
No comparison is permissible between the methodical squeezes of the Ammophila benumbing the cephalic nerve-centres and the brutal manipulations of the Philanthus emptying the crop of her Bee. The huntress of Grey Worms induces a temporary torpor of the mandibles; the ravisher of Bees makes them eject their honey. No one gifted with the least perspicacity will confound the two operations.
Try to persuade the Hairy Ammophila that Spiders have a nutty flavour, as Lalande asserts; and you will see how coldly your hints are received.
Westwood, J.O., on the classification of the Hymenoptera; on the Culicidae and Tabanidae; on a Hymenopterous parasite with a sedentary male; on the proportions of the sexes in Lucanus cervus and Siagonium; on the absence of ocelli in female Mutillidae; on the jaws of Ammophila; on the copulation of insects of distinct species; on the male of Crabro cribrarius; on the pugnacity of the male Tipulae; on the stridulation of Pirates stridulus; on the Cicadae; on the stridulating organs of the cricket; on Ephippiger vitium; on Pneumora; on the pugnacity of the Mantides; on Platyblemnus; on difference in the sexes of the Agrionidae; on the pugnacity of the males of a species of Tenthredinae; on the pugnacity of the male stag-beetle; on Bledius taurus and Siagonium; on lamellicorn beetles; on the coloration of Lithosia.
I will not quit my bell-jars without saying a word on the entomological tact of the captives when they decide to attack. One of the pluckiest of my subjects, the Hairy Ammophila, was not always provided with the hereditary dish of her family, the Grey Worm. I offered her indiscriminately any bare-skinned caterpillars that I chanced to find.
Have you ever seen the larder of a skilled Hunting Wasp, a Sphex for instance, a Scolia, an Ammophila? You haven't, have you? I thought as much. Yet it would be better to begin by doing so, before bringing the preservative microbe on the scene. The slightest examination would have shown you that the victuals cannot be compared exactly with smoked hams. The thing moves, therefore it is not dead.
Finally, the evolutionists, who "reconstruct the world in imagination," and who see in the relationship of neighbouring species a proof of descent or derivation, and a whole ideal series, will not fail to perceive throughout his work, in the elementary operations of the Eumenes and the Odynerus, cousins of the Cerceris, which sting their prey in places as yet ill determined, not indeed so many isolated attempts, but an incomplete process of invention, an attempt at procedures still in the fact of formation: in a word, the birth of that marvellous instinct which ends in the transcendent art of the Sphex and the Ammophila.
A curious little people, leading their solitary lives and greatly differentiated by the solitude, hardly any two alike, one nervous and excitable, another calm and unhurried; one careless in her work, another neat and thorough; this one suspicious, that one confiding; Ammophila using a pebble to pack down the earth in her burrow, while another species uses the end of her abdomen, verily a queer little people, with a lot of wild nature about them, and a lot of human nature, too.
Even supposing that the Ammophila has come in course of time to recognize, one after another, by tentative experiment, the points of its victim which must be stung to render it motionless, and also the special treatment that must be inflicted on the head to bring about paralysis without death, how can we imagine that elements so special of a knowledge so precise have been regularly transmitted, one by one, by heredity?
The Ammophila stamps on the ground; with her quivering tarsi she taps the cardboard on which the bell-glass stands; she lies down flat, drags herself along, gets up again, flattens herself once more. The wings jerk convulsively. From time to time the insect places its mandibles and forehead on the ground, then rears high upon its hind-legs as though to turn head over heels.
It is absolutely inert, except the mandibles, which are still capable of biting. THIRD ACT. The Ammophila clasps the paralysed victim between her legs; with the hooks of her mandibles she seizes the back of its neck, at the base of the first thoracic segment. For nearly ten minutes she munches this weak spot, which lies close to the cerebral nerve-centres.
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