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Updated: June 1, 2025
It may be said that the lesion results from the position in which the hymenopterous insect maintains its victim; for the sting is on the median line, and can only penetrate at the soft points; the two points attacked are then rigorously determined by physical circumstances.
This hymenopterous insect certainly shows in its acts as an artisan an inevitable instinct: hereditary intelligence has become less personal and less spontaneous. In certain cases, however, the instinct loses its rigidity and automatism.
Among other ingenious experiments to show the supposed difference between instinctive and reflective acts, Fabre brings forward the following : The Chalicodoma, a hymenopterous relative of the Bees, constructs nests composed of cells formed of mud agglutinated with saliva. The cell once constructed, the insect begins to fill it with honey before laying an egg there.
Everything announces a world of organic activity and life. In every bush, in the cracked bark of the trees, in the earth undermined by hymenopterous insects, life stirs audibly. It is, as it were, one of the many voices of Nature, and can only be heard by the sensitive and reverent ear of her true votaries. Be not too severe, great master.
How low in the scale of nature the law of battle descends I know not; male alligators have been described as fighting, bellowing, and whirling round, like Indians in a war-dance, for the possession of the females; male salmons have been observed fighting all day long; male stag-beetles sometimes bear wounds from the huge mandibles of other males; the males of certain hymenopterous insects have been frequently seen by that inimitable observer M. Fabre, fighting for a particular female who sits by, an apparently unconcerned beholder of the struggle, and then retires with the conqueror.
A hymenopterous relative of the Bees, the Megachile, cuts out in rose-leaves fragments of appropriate form which it bears away to a small hole in a tree, an abandoned mouse nest or some similar cavity. There it rolls them, works them up, and arranges them with much art, so as to manufacture what resemble thimbles, which it fills with honey and in which it lays.
We can understand why a classification founded on any single character or organ even an organ so wonderfully complex and important as the brain or on the high development of the mental faculties, is almost sure to prove unsatisfactory. This principle has indeed been tried with hymenopterous insects; but when thus classed by their habits or instincts, the arrangement proved thoroughly artificial.
The irritating liquid, in which chemists have not yet recognized any acid properties, is contained, as in the ant and other hymenopterous insects, in particular glands; and is probably too much diluted, and consequently too much weakened, if the skin be rubbed with the whole of the bruised insect.
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