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Updated: June 22, 2025
Would she be guilty of such inconceivable maternal aberration as to leave her nurseling without nourishment? I have told the story; let the reader decide. This instinctive predisposition, which does not leave the insect free to act and, through that very fact, saves it from error, bursts forth under yet another aspect. Let us grant the Bee as much judgment as you please.
"Let them all go," said he, "these magnates, to kiss the hand of this emperor of seven months, and wallow in the dust before the cradle of a whimpering nurseling! I shall nevertheless be the real emperor, and both sceptre and crown will remain in my hands!"
The startled hermit glared from his nurseling to Margaret, and from her to him, in amazement, equalled only by his agitation at her so unexpected return.
Having as yet learnt nothing by habit or by atavistic transmission, since it was making a first beginning, the nurseling would bite into its provender at random. It would be starving, it would have no respect for its prey. It would carve its joint at random; and we have just seen the fatal consequence of an ill-directed bite.
True, I have, by means of bonds, suppressed its outward movements, in order to provide the nurseling with a quiet meal, devoid of danger; but it was not in my power to subdue its internal movements, the quivering of the viscera and muscles irritated by its forced immobility and by the Scolia's bites.
To ensure that it shall not double up and crush the grub, I confine myself to reducing it to helplessness, leaving it otherwise just as I extracted it from its burrow. I must also be careful of its legs and mandibles, the least touch of which would rip open the nurseling. With a few turns of the finest wire I fix it to a little slab of cork, with its belly in the air.
The pile of honey laboriously gathered by the mother will not even be broken in upon by the nurseling for which it was intended. Another will profit by it, with none to say him nay. Tachinae and Melectae: those are the true parasites, consumers of others' goods. Can we say as much of the Chrysis or the Mutilla? In no wise. The Scoliae, whose habits are known to us, are certainly not parasites.
Whence arises this insuperable repugnance for provisions to which the family is unaccustomed? Here we may appeal to experiment. Let us do so: its dictum is the only one that can be trusted. The first idea that presents itself and the only one, I think, that can present itself is that the larva, the carnivorous nurseling, has its preferences, or we had better say its exclusive tastes.
If this is permitted to the poet, the chaste nurseling of the muses, ought it not to be conceded to the novelist, who is only the half-brother of the poet, and who still touches by so many points?
Around it I find only some scanty relics of its meals, consisting chiefly of Anthrax-wings, half-diaphanous and half-clouded. The mother would appear to have completed the victualling by fresh contributions, added day by day. I give the nurseling, which is an Anthrax-eater, a young Phaneroptera. The Locustid is attacked without hesitation.
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