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Updated: May 4, 2025
It is not possible to ascertain the chronological order of a laying, except by going to suitably-chosen species. Digging up the burrows of Cerceris-, Bembex- or Philanthus-wasps will never tell us that this grub has taken precedence of that in point of time nor enable us to decide whether one cocoon in a colony belongs to the same family as another.
I am rather interested to see the Bembex and the Tachytes, two workers in the same guild, employ such different methods to achieve the same result. The first begins by weaving an eel-trap of pure silk and next encrusts the grains of sand inside; the second, a bolder architect, is economical of the silk envelope, confines itself to a hanging girdle and builds course by course.
During this interval she has laid an egg on the body of the fly which she had previously benumbed with her sting, and which is to serve as food for the soft, footless grub soon to be hatched from the egg. From what I could make out, the Bembex makes a fresh excavation for every egg to be deposited; at least in two or three of the galleries which I opened there was only one fly enclosed.
She must surely be obliged to follow the method of the Bembex, whose larva receives, at intervals, the necessary nourishment; the amount increasing as the larva grows. The facts confirm this deduction. I spoke just now of the tediousness of my watching when watching the colonies of the Philanthus. It was perhaps even more tedious than when I was keeping an eye upon the Bembex.
If the mother were away, the house would be shut up; and the Golden Wasp, that sneak-thief in royal robes, could not get in. She enters, therefore, dwarf as she is, the house of the giantess whose ruin she is meditating; she makes her way right to the back, all heedless of the Bembex, her sting and her powerful jaws. What cares she that the home is not deserted?
One would think that they were two friends meeting on the threshold, one going in, the other out! It is written in the book of fate: everything shall happen without impediment in the burrow of the Bembex; and next year, if we open the cells of that mighty huntress of Gad-flies, we shall find some which contain a russet-silk cocoon, the shape of a thimble with its orifice closed with a flat lid.
The thousands of pores with which the shell is pierced allow the inside moisture to evaporate and the outer air to penetrate as and when needed. The stony caskets of the Bembex- and Stizus-wasps are endowed, notwithstanding their hardness, with similar means of exchange between the vitiated and the pure atmosphere.
On the other hand, we can quite easily, without arming the eye with a lens, perceive the mouth-apparatus and particularly the mandibles of either a honey-eater, such as an Osmia, Chalicodoma or Megachile, or a game-eater, such as a Scolia, Ammophila or Bembex. All these possess stout pincers, capable of gripping, grinding and tearing.
In solidity and volume her cocoon rivals that of the largest Bembex; but it differs from it, at first sight, by a singular feature of which I know no other example. From the side of the shell, which is uniformly smoothed on every side, a rough knob protrudes, a little clod of sand stuck on to the rest.
I will limit myself to mentioning its method of constructing strong-boxes in order to compare it with that of the Bembex and above all with that of the Tachytes, a consumer, like itself, of Praying Mantes.
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