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Updated: June 15, 2025
The posture of the scoundrelly insect is strikingly expressive; one reads in it the brutal desires of a creature in ambush, the cunning patience that postpones attack. The choice is made, and Philanthus throws herself upon her victim. Turn by turn tumbled and tumbling, the two insects roll over and over. But the struggle soon quiets down, and the assassin commences to plunder her prize.
In "that hideous lout" the Scorpion he shows us a rough epitome of the shapeless head, the truncated face of the spider. The Tachinae, those "brazen diptera" which swarm on the sunny sand on the watch for Bembex or Philanthus, in order to establish their offspring at its expense, "are bandits clad in fustian, the head wrapped in a red handkerchief, awaiting the hour of attack!"
Do not let us forget the Philanthus, who takes no account either of the fissures beneath the abdominal plates or of the wide hiatus behind the corselet, but plunges her weapon, at the base of the throat, through a gap of a fraction of a millimetre. Let us just mention the Mantis-hunting Tachytes.
Solidly planted on her sustaining tripod, the two hinder tarsi and the tips of the wings, she at last crooks her abdomen upwards and again stings the Bee under the chin. The originality of the Philanthus' posture at the moment of the murder surpasses the anything that I have hitherto seen. The desire for knowledge in natural history has its cruel side.
If the Philanthus were guided in her operation solely by the question of vulnerability, it is here certainly that she ought to strike, instead of persistently seeking the narrow slit in the neck. The weapon would not need to hesitate and grope; it would obtain admission into the tissues off-hand.
The going and coming is repeated at close intervals until the warehouse is full. The burrow of the Philanthus is far from showing any such animation, even in a populous colony. In vain were my watches prolonged for whole mornings or afternoons; it was but very rarely that the mother whom I had seen go in with a Bee came out again for a second expedition.
The Philanthus proposes to obtain the honeyed broth without ripping up the Bee, a proceeding which would damage the game when it is hunted on behalf of the larvae, without resorting to the murderous extirpation of the crop. She must, by able handling, by skilful pressure, make the Bee disgorge, she must milk her, in a manner of speaking. Suppose the Bee stung behind the corselet and paralysed.
She responded to my hopes with such energy that I thought myself in possession of an unequalled method of observation, by means of which I could witness again and again, to satiety even, incidents of a kind so difficult to surprise in a state of nature. Alas! the early days of my acquaintance with Philanthus promised me more than the future had in store for me!
This refusal to touch honey, whether poisonous or repugnant, is connected with principles of alimentation too general to be a gastronomic peculiarity of the Philanthus grub. Other carnivorous larvæ at least in the series of the Hymenoptera must share it. Let us experiment. The method need not be changed.
I see her adopt two methods. In the first, which is more usual than the other, the Bee is lying on her back; and the Philanthus, belly to belly with her, grips her with her six legs while snapping at her neck with her mandibles. The abdomen is now curved forward from behind, along the prostrate victim, feels with its tip, gropes about a little and ends by reaching the under part of the neck.
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