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Updated: June 21, 2025
If the dragon-fly could catch her engrossed in some small slaughter of her own, and, pouncing upon her from above, grip the back of her armed abdomen in his great grinding jaws, her sting could do nothing but dart out vainly like a dark, licking flame; and she would prove as good a meal as the most unresisting bluebottle or horse-fly.
The call of nature awakening from its long winter sleep drummed in his heart. He could sympathize with the bluebottle buzzing against the sunny windowpane in its efforts to reach the free world outside. Recess! With the sound of the gong his heart leaped, but he kept his place in the line with perfect decorum. It would never do to be called back now for a momentary indiscretion.
"Worse and worse wuz-z-z-ooz-wooz," said the bluebottle, and off he flew, and never sang any more songs to the bees; while the old bee burst out laughing so heartily at the way in which the bluebottle was frightened, that he let all the bee-bread tumble out of his baskets, and before he could pick it up, a bee from another hive flew off with it.
As like as two peas, and equally keen about sport they would go twenty miles to chase a bluebottle round an attic, sooner than not hunt something. So I told him there was a mouse de trop in my rooms, and he promised to bring Nipper next morning. I was going out hunting myself.
The ordinary bluebottle, on the contrary, which lays her eggs upon butcher's meat or carrion, lays them in enormous batches. Trusting in the inexhaustible riches represented by the corpse, she is prodigal of offspring, and takes no account of numbers. In other cases the provision is acquired by audacious brigandage, which exposes the newly born offspring to a thousand mortal accidents.
This banquet can be observed only in the open country, under the rays of a hot sun. Saprini and greenbottles never enter our houses; the flesh fly visits us but discreetly, does not feel at home with us; the only one who comes fussing along is the bluebottle, who thus escapes the tribute due to the consumer of plump sausages.
Was it not all her eyes could do to hinder palpable smiles in the sermon, and her monkey from playing tricks on his bear, who, by some fatality, always sat in front, with his irresistible broad back, down which, in spite of all her vigilance, Jock had once thrust a large bluebottle fly.
The first heat of the sun, drinking up the dew, would discover her sailing forth to war; his full, sizzling rays would reveal her waging violent warfare with the bluebottle flies over some carcass; into his amber light of the noon her yellow flag would suddenly rise from out the cool shade of the larder, where she had been carving meat, and "when the sun mended his twisted copper nets," he would flash in bronze from her glistening cuirass as she droned by high over some wriggling grub, caterpillar, or palsied fly fast locked in her jaws and all for her young, all for her couple of dozen legless horrors, hanging by their tails, each in its narrow cell, in darkness and in dead silence, in the embryo city under the secret earth.
A catch-crop ploughed in like this enriches the land. Moreover a number of weeds are buried with the catch-crop before they have time to blossom and to shed their seed. The yellow blossom of the Charlock is pretty, and the Poppy is the finest scarlet wild flower we have. There is a third flower among the wheat to-day, the beautiful blue Corn Flower or Corn Bluebottle.
I lavishly powder some pieces of hard-boiled white of egg with the potent drug, just as I did with the eggs of the Bluebottle. The oven is not brought into play, neither is distilled water added, nor hydrochloric acid: two auxiliaries which are recommended. The experiment is conducted in exactly the same way as that of the tubes with the vermin.
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