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Updated: June 19, 2025
If the Bee, after we have rid her of the parasites which she may be carrying, be taken by the wings and held for a moment in contact with the flower, we invariably find her, after this rapid contact, overrun by Meloes clinging to her hairs.
Moreover, what similarity of smell can we admit between all the insects which, dead or alive, whole or in pieces, fresh or dried, suit the Meloes, while anything else does not suit them? A wretched louse, a living speck, leaves us mightily perplexed as to the sensibility which directs it. Here is yet one more riddle added to all the others.
Instinct is at fault here; and fecundity makes up for it. But instinct recovers its infallibility in another case. The Meloes, as we have seen, pass without difficulty from the flower to the objects within their reach, whatever these may be, smooth or hairy, living or inanimate.
On all these Flies, with very few exceptions, I found Meloe-larvæ, motionless in the silky down of the thorax. This Wasp merely grazes, so to speak, the surface of a flower; I catch her; there are Meloes moving about her body.
In the Meloes, it is half-enclosed in the split integuments of the pseudochrysalis, even as these, in their turn, are half-enclosed in the skin of the secondary larva. From the tertiary larva onwards the metamorphoses follow their habitual course, that is to say, this larva becomes a nymph; and this nymph the perfect insect.
In this way the Sitares and the Meloes, alike in habits and transformations, will be compared; and the comparison will throw a certain light upon the strange metamorphoses of these insects.
Circumstances, however, favoured me more than I dared hope and, after six hours' labour, in which the pick played a great part, I became the possessor, by the sweat of my brow, of a considerable number of cells occupied by Sitares and two other cells appropriated by Meloes.
This done, the organism becomes transformed to such a degree that repeated observations are required to make us believe the evidence of our eyes. I interrupt the history of the Sitares to speak of the Meloes, those uncouth Beetles, with their clumsy belly and their limp wing-cases yawning over their back like the tails of a fat man's coat that is far too tight for its wearer.
Upon all these objects, offered with the tweezers, the Meloes flung themselves without any difficulty; but, instead of keeping quiet, as they do on the bodies of the Bees, they soon convinced me, by their restless behaviour, that they found themselves as much out of their element on these furry materials as on the smooth surface of a bit of straw.
Were it necessary to prove this, it would be enough to say that we never see these larvæ attempt to pierce the skin of the Bee, or else to nibble at a hair or two, nor do we see them increase in size so long as they are on the Bee's body. To the Meloes, as to the Sitares, the Anthophora serves merely as a vehicle which conveys them to their goal, the victualled cell.
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