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Updated: May 4, 2025
This insect is scarcely more advanced than birds, who feed their young from day to day. And it is a great labour to re-open every time the gallery which leads to the nursery; on all these visits, in fact, the Bembex fills it up on leaving, and causes the disappearance of all revealing traces.
My expectations are thus confirmed; as with Bembex, slayer of Diptera, so Philanthus, killer of bees, lays her egg upon the first body stored, and completes, at intervals, the provisioning of the cells. The problem of the dead bee is elucidated; there remains the other problem, of incomparable interest Why, before they are given over to the larvæ, are the bees robbed of their honey?
Either unmindful of the danger or paralysed with terror, the Bembex mother lets her have her way. The unconcern of the invaded is equalled only by the boldness of the invader. Have I not seen the Anthophora-bee, at the door to her dwelling, stand a little to one side and make room for the Melecta to enter the honey-stocked cells and substitute her family for the unhappy parent's?
At the moment when urgent necessity is sending up prices, one of them brings me a magnificent Gad-fly intended for the Bembex. For two hours, when the sun was at its height, he kept watch on the threshing-floor hard by, waiting for the blood-sucker, in order to catch him on the buttocks of the Mules which trot round and round trampling the corn.
In "that hideous lout" the Scorpion he shows us a rough epitome of the shapeless head, the truncated face of the spider. The Tachinae, those "brazen diptera" which swarm on the sunny sand on the watch for Bembex or Philanthus, in order to establish their offspring at its expense, "are bandits clad in fustian, the head wrapped in a red handkerchief, awaiting the hour of attack!"
Moreover, the question of health may well be involved. There is nothing to tell us that the Spider, that treat for the Pompilus, is not poison, or at least unwholesome food, to the Bembex, the lover of Gad-flies; that the Ammophila's succulent caterpillar is not repugnant to the stomach of the Sphex fed upon the dry Acridian.
The Tachytes builds in quite another fashion, although its work, once finished, does not differ from that of the Bembex. The larva surrounds itself, to begin with, about the middle of its body with a silken girdle which a number of threads, very irregularly distributed, hold in place and connect with the walls of the cell. Sand is collected, within reach of the worker, on this general scaffolding.
I shall return to it, not to solve it, but to show even more plainly how obscure and profound it is. But we will first complete the story of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. The colony which forms the subject of my investigations is established in a mound of fine sand which I myself cut into, a couple of years ago, in order to unearth a few Bembex larvae.
The Parnopes' emerald-and-carmine thorax possesses not the least feature of resemblance with the black-and-yellow livery of the Bembex. And this Chrysis also is a dwarf in comparison with the ardent Nimrod who goes hunting Gad-flies. Besides, what a curious idea, to make the parasite's success depend upon a more or less faithful likeness with the insect to be robbed!
The Tachytes, the Bembeces, the Stizi, the Palari and other burrowers build composite cocoons, hard as fruit-stones, formed of an encrustation of sand in a network of silk. We are already acquainted with the work of the Bembex.
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