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Updated: June 15, 2025
In the case of the Philanthus the honeyed flowers, although welcomed, are not indispensable. It is enough if from time to time I place in the cage a few living bees. Half a dozen a day is about the proper allowance. With no other diet than the honey extracted from their victims I keep my specimens of Philanthus for a fortnight and three weeks.
Now the dead bee retains for some minutes the reflex use of the sting, as I know to my cost: for removing the bee too soon from the aggressor, and handling it carelessly, I have received a most effectual sting. In her long embrace of the poisoned bee, how does Philanthus avoid this sting, which does not willingly give up its life without vengeance? Are there not sometimes unexpected accidents?
This persistence on her part to retain her hold on the cumbrous burden tells us pretty plainly that the game would go straight to the cells if the Philanthus had her liberty. Well, these Bees intended for the larvae are stung under the chin like the others; they are real corpses; they are manipulated, squeezed, drained of their honey exactly as the others are.
She is as powerful as her executioner; like the other, she carries a rapier, an even more formidable one and more painful, at least to my fingers. For centuries and centuries the Philanthus has been storing her away in her cellars; and the poor innocent meekly submits, without being taught by the annual extermination of her race how to deliver herself from the aggressor by a well-aimed thrust.
Indeed, once the contest is opened, the Philanthus becomes so entirely absorbed in her operation that I can remove the cover and follow every vicissitude of the tragedy with my pocket-lens. After recognizing the invariable position of the wound, I bend back and open the articulation of the head.
It is as plain as a pikestaff: outside my cages, when the opportunity offers, the Philanthus must also kill the Bee on her own account. The Odynerus asks nothing from the Chrysomela but a mere condiment, the aromatic juice of the rump; the other extracts from her victim an ample supplement to her victuals, the crop full of honey.
Why, for example, does the Philanthus, that slender wasp, which captures the honey-bee upon the blossoms in order to feed her larvae; why, before she carries her prey to her offspring, does she "outrage the dying insect," by squeezing its crop in order to empty it of honey, in which she appears to delight, and does indeed actually delight?
I had placed four Bees and as many Eristales under the bell-glass at the same time, with the object of estimating the Philanthus' entomological knowledge in the matter of the distinction of species. Reciprocal quarrels break out in the mixed colony. Suddenly, in the midst of the fray, the killer is killed. She tumbles over on her back, she waves her legs; she is dead. Who struck the blow?
Each operator has her own tactics, which tolerate no apprenticeship. The Ammophila, the Scolia, the Philanthus and the others all tell us the same thing: none can leave descendants if she be not from the outset the skilful paralyser or slayer that she is to-day. The "almost" is impracticable when the future of the race is at stake.
On the rock-rose bushes, with their great pink flowers, "the pretty Thomisus, the little crab-spider, clad in satin," watches for the domestic bee, and suddenly kills it, seizing the back of the head, while the Philanthus, also seizing it by the head, plunges its sting under the chin, neither too high nor too low, but "exactly in the narrow joint of the neck," for both insects know that in this limited spot, in which is concentrated a small nervous mass, something like a brain, is "the weak point, most vulnerable of all," the fault in the cuirass, the vital centre.
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