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At Carpentras too the Anthophorae lived in abundance; those wild bees with whom the vexed and enigmatic history of the Sitaris and the Meloë is bound up; those little beetles, cousins of the Cantharides, whose complex metamorphoses and astonishing and peculiar habits have been revealed by Fabre.
During the course of the year I learnt from Léon Dufour, to whom I had spoken of the Sitares, that the tiny creature which he had found on the Andrenæ and described under the generic name of Triungulinus, was recognized later by Newport as the larva of a Meloe, or Oil-beetle. Now it so happened that I had found a few Oil-beetles in the cells of the same Anthophora that nourishes the Sitares.
Now if we compare these early stages of mites and myriopods with those of the true six-footed insects, as in the larval Meloë, Cicada, Thrips and Dragon fly, we shall see quite plainly that they all share a common form. What does this mean?
This larva was the young Meloe in the second period of its development. I was not able to preserve these two precious cells, which I had opened wide to examine the contents. On my return from Carpentras, I found that their honey had been spilt by the motion of the carriage and that their inhabitants were dead.
The whole subject of the metamorphosis of this beetle needs revision, but Fabre states that the larva, soon after entering the nest of its host, changes its skin and assumes a second larva form. Newport, who with Siebold has carefully described the metamorphoses of Meloë, does not mention this stage in its development, which Fabre calls "pseudo-chrysalis."
The touch of the honey is as fatal to them as to the young Sitares. Searches made at various periods in the nests of the Hairy-footed Anthophora had taught me some years earlier that Meloe cicatricosus, like the Sitares, is a parasite of that Bee; indeed I had at different times discovered adult Meloes, dead and shrivelled, in the Bee's cells.
I wish to settle the point once for all whether the Pediculus Mellitae is or is not the larva of Meloe. Here is a fellow-creature of mine and yours who is asked to see all the glories of the firmament brought close to him, and he is too busy with a little unmentionable parasite that infests the bristly surface of a bee to spare an hour or two of a single evening for the splendors of the universe!
And we still have the two sexes that goes without saying and still identically the same species. "Bramble-bees and Others": chapter 10. "The Glow-worm and Other Beetles": chapter 6. Amply nourished this Meloe then acquires her normal size, the size in which she usually figures in the collections. A like prosperity awaits her when she usurps the provisions of Megachile sericans.
We cannot but think, from observations made on the humble bee, the wasp, two species of moths and several other insects, that this "hyper-metamorphosis" is not so abnormal a mode of insect metamorphosis as has been supposed, and that the changes of these insects, made beneath the skin of the mature larva before assuming the pupa state, are almost as remarkable as those of Meloë and Sitaris, though less easily observed than they.
In the first batch, which, it is true, is the most prolific of all, Meloe proscarabæus, according to Newport's calculations, produces the astonishing number of 4,218 eggs, which is double the number of eggs laid by a Sitaris. And what must the number be, when we allow for the two or three batches that follow the first!
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