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When the Pelopaeus "has stored her lair with game," when the Cerceris has sealed the crypt to which she has confided the future of her race, neither one nor the other can foresee "the future offspring which their faceted eyes will never behold, and the very object of their labours is to them occult." With them, as with all, life can only be a perpetual illusion.
Not a single circumstance, however favourable, will ever persuade the Pelopaeus that young Crickets, for instance, are as good as Spiders and that her family would accept them gladly. Instinct binds her down to the national diet. Cf. "The Life of the Spider" by J. Henri Fabre translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos; chapters 9 to 14 and appendix.
This is the mechanical side of the insect, the fatum, the only thing which is able to explain the monstrous illogicality of a Pelopaeus when misled by my artifices. Is the Lamb when it first grips the teat a free and conscious agent, capable of improvement in its difficult art of taking nourishment?
But should she find something better, the potter takes possession of that something better and instals herself in the home of man. The Pelopaeus supplies her larvae with provisions in the form of Spiders. There you have instinct.
Are the habits of an insect capable of modification? No, decidedly not, if the habit in question belongs to the province of instinct; yes, if it belongs to that of discernment. Let us state this fundamental distinction more precisely by the aid of a few examples. The Pelopaeus builds her cells with earth already softened, with mud.
Bates was rather startled by seeing one fly directly at his face, on which it had espied a motuca, and which it carried off, holding it tightly to its breast. The pelopaeus wasp builds a nest of clay, shaped like a pouch, two inches in length, and attaches it to a branch.
The insect therefore ceases to store her honey, and, in spite of this accident, lays her egg in the empty cell, thus leaving the future nursling without nourishment." In the case of the Pelopaeus, Fabre calls our attention to one of the most instructive physiological spectacles that can be imagined.
Even if one has never seen the Pelopaeus, one readily conceives an impression of "her wasp-like costume, and curving abdomen, suspended at the end of a long thread."
I spent many an hour watching their proceedings; a short account of the habits of some of these busy creatures may be interesting. The most conspicuous was a large yellow and black wasp, with a remarkably long and narrow waist, the Pelopaeus fistularis. This species collected the clay in little round pellets, which it carried off, after rolling them into a convenient shape, in its mouth.
Their habits are similar to those of the Pelopaeus- namely, they carry off the clay in their mandibles, and have a different song when they hasten away with the burden to that which they sing whilst at work. Trypoxylon albitarse, which is a large black kind, three-quarters of an inch in length, makes a tremendous fuss while building its cell.
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