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Despite my negative attempts, therefore, I remain convinced that the Anthrax flies strew their eggs one by one, on the spots frequented by those bees who suit their grubs. Each of their sudden strokes with the tip of the abdomen represents a laying. They take no precaution to place the germ under cover; for that matter, any such precaution would be rendered impossible by the mother's structure.
An occasion equally famous in the history of medicine was a day in 1881, when Pasteur determined that a flock of sheep vaccinated with the attenuated virus of anthrax remained well, when every one of the unvaccinated infected from the same material had died.
And we can say the same of the other grub eaters that drain their victims without wounding them: all are engaged in their death dealing work during the period of torpor, when the tissues are fluidified. They empty their patient, who has become a bag of running grease with a diffused life; but not one, among those I know, reaches the Anthrax' perfection in the art of extraction.
During the fourteen days through which the nourishment of the Anthrax continues, the aspect of the larva remains that of living flesh; until all its substance has been literally transferred, by a kind of transpiration, to the body of the nurseling, and the victim, slowly exhausted, drained to the last drop, while retaining to the end just enough life to prove refractory to decomposition, is reduced to the mere skin, which, being insufflated, puffs itself out and resumes the precise form of the larva, there being nowhere a point of escape for the compressed air."
The first, Anthrax sinuata, FALLEN, lives in the cocoons of Osmia tricornis, who herself builds her nest in the old galleries of the hairy-footed Anthophora; the second, Anthrax trifasciata, MEIGEN, exploits the Chalicodoma of the Sheds. I will consult both. Once more, here am I, somewhat late in life, at Carpentras, whose rude Gallic name sets the fool smiling and the scholar thinking.
The Chalicodoma's nests abound, but I cannot see a single Anthrax make a black speck upon their surface. Not one, busy with her laying, settles in front of me. At most, from time to time, I can just see one passing far away, with an impetuous rush. I lose her in the distance; and that is all. It is impossible to be present at the laying of the egg.
The Osmia, still more precocious, though dating from the same period, shows herself exclusively in the adult form, a bad omen for my investigations, for what the Anthrax demands is the larva and not the perfect insect. The fly's grub doubles my apprehensions. Its development is complete, the larva on which it feeds is consumed, perhaps several weeks ago.
You were born to sharpen pins while Pasteur was born to invent the inoculation against anthrax, and the Revolution will leave you both to your respective employments. Well, it is this horrible principle, so noxious to society, so brutalizing to the individual, source of so much harm, that we propose to discuss in its divers manifestations.
Then, on May 31 st, all sixty of the animals were inoculated, a protected and unprotected one alternately, with an extremely virulent culture of anthrax microbes that had been in Pasteur's laboratory since 1877. This accomplished, the animals were left together in one enclosure to await the issue.
The parasite has wiped out half the colony. To complete the disaster, it is not unusual for the grub-eaters, the Leucopsis and her rival, the pygmy Chalcis, to have decimated the other half. I say nothing of Anthrax sinuata, whom I sometimes see coming from the nests of the Chalicodoma of the Sheds; her larva preys on the Three-horned Osmia, the Mason-bee's visitor.
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