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Updated: June 29, 2025
In these tiny creatures, with which I was powdered here and there as with yellow dust, I soon recognized an old acquaintance, the young Oil-beetles, whom I now saw for the first time elsewhere than in the Bees' fur or the interior of their cells. I could not lose so excellent an opportunity of learning how these larvæ manage to establish themselves upon the bodies of their foster-parents.
The slough of the tertiary larva fits even more closely to the inner surface of the pseudochrysalid sheath. The nymph alone does not adhere to its envelope. In the Cerocomæ and the Oil-beetles, each form of the hypermetamorphosis becomes detached from the preceding skin by a complete extraction; the contents are removed from the ruptured container and have no further connection with it.
And so, all through the winter, I collect Osmia-cocoons, picked up in the nests of the Mason-bee of the Sheds; I go to Carpentras to glean a more plentiful supply in the nests of the Hairy-footed Anthophora, that old acquaintance whose wonderful cities I used to undermine when I was studying the history of the Oil-beetles. "The Life of the Fly": chapters 2 and 4.
Now it was on a composite, a dandelion, that Newport seemed to remember seeing some young Oil-beetles; and my attention therefore was first of all directed to the plants which I have named. On one head of camomile I counted forty of these tiny insects, cowering motionless in the centre of the florets.
Thus the Oil-beetles, far from laying their eggs at random, as their wandering life might lead one to suppose, and leaving their young to the task of approaching their future home, are able to recognize the spots haunted by the Anthophoræ and lay their eggs in the near neighbourhood of those spots.
It was impossible that all these larvæ, the tale of whose alarming thousands I would not venture to define, should form one family and recognize a common mother; despite what Newport has told us of the Oil-beetles' astonishing fecundity, I could not believe this, so great was their multitude.
The Oil-beetles, therefore, lacking the instinct of the Sitares, are endowed with incomparably greater fecundity. The richness of their ovaries atones for the insufficiency of instinct by proportioning the number of germs in accordance with the risks of destruction. What transcendent harmony is this, which thus holds the scales between the fecundity of the ovaries and the perfection of instinct!
All has not been told concerning the Meloidæ, those strange parasites, some of which, the Sitares and the Oil-beetles, attach themselves, like the tiniest of Lice, to the fleece of various Bees to get themselves carried into the cell where they will destroy the egg and afterwards feed upon the ration of honey.
It will be the starting-point of a chapter which perhaps will give us some fresh sidelights upon the history of the hypermetamorphosis. The larva is nearly 2 millimetres long. Coming out of a good-sized egg, it is endowed with greater vigour than the larvæ of the Sitares and Oil-beetles. The head is large, rounded, slightly wider than the prothorax and of a rather brighter red.
In their first form, the Oil-beetles are parasites of the Anthophoræ; their tiny grub, when it leaves the egg, has itself carried into the cell by the Bee whose victuals are to form its food.
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