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Updated: June 16, 2025
If the point explored be found suitable, the insect hoists itself on tiptoe so as to give full scope to the play of its mechanism; it brings the tip of the belly a little forward; and the entire ovipositor inoculating-needle and scabbard stands perpendicular to the cocoon, in the center of the quadrilateral described by the four hind legs, an eminently favorable position for obtaining the maximum effect.
When these were cut off close to the head, the Sphex seized the palpi; but when these were likewise cut off, the attempt to drag its prey into the burrow was given up in despair. The Sphex had not intelligence enough to seize one of the six legs or the ovipositor of the grasshopper, which, as M. Fabre remarks, would have served equally well.
To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the great thing to be desired. When I see the large ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loop over her back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in the trunk of a tree, I do not fully appreciate the spectacle till I know she is feeling for the burrow of a tree-borer, Tremex, upon the larvae of which her own young feed.
Another kind of insect stings the oak leaf and there develops a pale, smooth, solid, semi-transparent sphere, the size of a robin's egg, dense and succulent like the flesh of an apple, with the larvæ of the insect subsisting in its interior. Each of these widely different forms is evoked from the oak leaf by the magic of an insect's ovipositor.
Perched upon the summit quite near the north pole was an insect, a wasp, much smaller than the egg itself. And as I looked, I saw it at the climax of its diminutive life; for it reared up, resting on the tips of two legs and the iridescent wings, and sunk its ovipositor deep into the crystalline surface.
When impelled by instinct to provide for the continuance of its species, the Phora enters the beehive and gains admission to a cell, when it bores with its ovipositor through the skin of the bee larva, laying its long oval egg in a horizontal position just under the skin.
Next day, the condition is much the same, with an aggravation of the paralysis, which has now attacked the middle-legs. On the day after that, the legs do not move, but the antennae, the palpi and the ovipositor continue to flutter actively. This is the condition of the Ephippiger stabbed three times in the thorax by the Languedocian Sphex.
For two or three seconds the insect writhes in convulsions and then falls on its side, motionless throughout, save in the ovipositor and the antennae. Nothing stirs so long as the creature is left alone; but, if I tickle it with a hair-pencil, the four hind-legs move sharply and grip the point. As for the fore-legs, smitten in their nerve-centre, they are quite lifeless.
But natural selection can and does often produce structures for the direct injury of other species, as we see in the fang of the adder, and in the ovipositor of the ichneumon, by which its eggs are deposited in the living bodies of other insects.
The stages of metamorphosis in the Diptera are no more suddenly acquired than in the bee or butterfly. In all these insects the rudiments of the wings, legs, and even of the ovipositor of the adult exist in the young larva. We have found somewhat similar intermediate stages in the metamorphoses of the beetles. The insects we have mentioned are those with a "complete metamorphosis."
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