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Updated: May 26, 2025
This morning my attention was drawn by a noise resembling the growl of a dog, when I perceived a black insect nearly as large as a bird carrying something like a grasshopper, alight, and disappear in a hole. On digging, it suddenly arose from amidst the dust and escaped; but we found there several large larvae; this was the most bulky insect I ever saw.
I have referred to the damage in my plum orchard at Aldington from the attack of the larvae of the winter-moth; the damage is not confined to the actual year of its occurrence, the crop suffers the following year owing to the previous defoliation of the tree, which is weakened and is unable to mature healthy fruit buds.
These females spend the winter in their cells, as do many of the early-hatching melliferous insects, such as Anthophorae and Mason-bees, who build their nests in the spring, the larvae reaching the perfect state in the summer and yet remaining shut up in their cells until the following May.
In the first place, the germs in the parent's body may themselves be subject to struggle and natural selection, and not share equally in the food-supply. In the case of the lower animals the germs and larvae float independently in the water, and are exposed to many influences.
Out of a dozen butterfly chrysalids collected, six were worthless; they were stiff, and when opened were stuffed full of small white larvae, which had eaten away the coming butterfly in its shell. They were the offspring of a parasite insect, which thus provided for the sustenance of its young by eating up other young, after the cruel way of nature.
Skelmersdale meant by "these here things they rode," there is no telling. Larvae, perhaps, or crickets, or the little beetles that elude us so abundantly. There was a place where water splashed and gigantic king-cups grew, and there in the hotter times the fairies bathed together. There were games being played and dancing and much elvish love-making, too, I think, among the moss-branch thickets.
Things must happen likewise at the wasps'. Incapable of standing on the slant of the paper wall, the newborn grubs slide to the bottom of the underground cavity, which contains, especially at the end of the summer, a heaped up provender of deceased wasps and dead larvae removed from the cells and flung outside the house, all nice and gamy, as proper maggot's food should be.
These are the ones that will not accompany the queen; they will remain to guard the old home, feed the nine or ten thousand eggs, the eighteen thousand larvae, the thirty-six thousand nymphs and seven or eight royal princesses, that to-day shall all be abandoned. Why they have been singled out for this austere duty, by what law, or by whom, it is not in our power to divine.
Notwithstanding the sulphureous exhalations from the lake, the quantity of vegetable matter generated there and its heat make it the resort of an infinite variety of insect tribes, and even in the coldest days in winter numbers of flies may be observed on the vegetables surrounding its banks or on its floating island's, and a quantity of their larvae may be seen there sometimes encrusted and entirely destroyed by calcareous matter, which is likewise often the fate of the insects themselves, as well as of various species of shell-fish that are found amongst the vegetables, which grow and are destroyed in the travertine on its banks.
As he got out the word larvae, a faint sense of the ridiculous seemed to take hold of the Scarabee, and for the first and only time during my acquaintance with him a slight attempt at a smile showed itself on his features. It was barely perceptible and gone almost as soon as seen, yet I am pleased to put it on record that on one occasion at least in his life the Scarabee smiled.
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