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Updated: June 7, 2025
It would be no more to her than any other refuse, a bit of gravel, which, seized with the mandibles, crushed perhaps, would be sent to join the rubbish-heap outside. Once removed from the soil and exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, the pupa would inevitably perish. I admire this intelligent foresight of the maggot, which forgoes the comfort of the moment for the security of the future.
The nest, however, must have been close at hand, for two or three individuals of F. fusca were rushing about in the greatest agitation, and one was perched motionless with its own pupa in its mouth on the top of a spray of heath over its ravaged home. Such are the facts, though they did not need confirmation by me, in regard to the wonderful instinct of making slaves.
Three went through the succession of moults and feeding periods in fine shape, and the first week in September transformed into shiny pupa cases, not one of which was nearly as large as that of the caterpillar brought to me by Mr. Idlewine. I fed these caterpillars on black walnut leaves, as they ate them in preference to hickory. I am slightly troubled about this moth.
The plate, then, is filled with a dark, running gruel, not unlike tar in appearance. If we allow evaporation free course, the broth sets, into a hard, easily crumbled slab, something like toffee. Caught in this matrix, grubs and pupa perish, incapable of freeing themselves. Analytical chemistry has proved fatal to them.
Further investigations will only swell the aggregate of the products of this obliging organ. When the exit-way is prepared and the cell upholstered in velvet and closed with a three-fold barricade, the industrious worm has concluded its task. It lays aside its tools, sheds its skin and becomes a nymph, a pupa, weakness personified, in swaddling-clothes, on a soft couch.
Enclosed in her pupa, the nascent fly begins by bursting the lid of her casket with a hernia which comes between her two eyes and doubles or trebles the size of her head. This cephalic blister throbs: it swells and subsides by turns, owing to the alternate flux and reflux of the blood. It is like the piston of an hydraulic press opening and forcing back the front part of the keg.
A dark band shows on the back of the four segments with their two rows of spikes; three spots appear on the two next rings; the anal armor becomes darker. In this manner we foresee the black livery of the coming insect. The time has arrived for the pupa to work at the exit gallery.
Its young is, however, an insect-eater; but the Monedula does not, like other burrowing or sand wasps, put away a store of insects or spiders, partially paralyzed, as a provision for the grub till it reaches the pupa state; it actually supplies the grub with fresh-caught insects as long as food is required, killing the prey it captures outright, and bringing it in to its young; so that its habits, in this particular, are more bird- than wasp-like.
For years I could find nothing on the subject of how a moth from a burrowing caterpillar made its appearance. In two recent works I find the statement that the pupa cases come to the surface before the moths leave them, but how the operation is performed is not described or explained.
Its antennae were nearly horizontal now, and from its position I decided that the wings as they lay in the pupa case were folded neither to the back nor to the front, but pressed against the body in a lengthwise crumpled mass, the heavy front rib, or costa, on top. Again I changed plates with all speed.
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