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Updated: June 24, 2025
The colour darkened hourly, the feet and claspers seemed to draw inside, and one morning on going to look there were some greenish brown pupae. They shone as if freshly varnished, as indeed they were, for the substance provided to facilitate the emergence of the pupae from the caterpillar skins dries in a coating, that helps to harden the cases and protect them.
There it stood in a bank window in big black letters staring straight at her: WANTED: CATERPILLARS, COCOONS, CHRYSALIDES, PUPAE CASES, BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS, INDIAN RELICS OF ALL KINDS. HIGHEST SCALE OF PRICES PAID IN CASH Elnora caught the wicket at the cashier's desk with both hands to brace herself against disappointment. "Who is it wants to buy cocoons, butterflies, and moths?" she panted.
Here, hung up or embedded, are the dry carcasses of Opatra, Asidae and other Tenebrionidae that favour underrock shelters; segments of Iuli, bleached by the sun; shells of Pupae, common among the stones; and, lastly, Snail-shells, selected from among the smallest. These relics are obviously, for the most part, table-leavings, broken victuals.
Then a pan of sand was baked, and a box with a glass cover was filled. I laid the pupa on top of the sand, and then dug up the first one, as I was afraid of the earth in which it lay. The case was sound, and in fine condition. All of these pupae lived and seemed perfect.
The ants cannot recognise one another apart; they show their mandibles, and then sidle away in a panic. But by degrees calm is restored. The sanguineae begin by removing the pupae, taking indifferently those of both species. Some of the pratenses follow their example. From time to time fights take place, but these are merely single combats, and they grow less and less fierce.
Larvae are very scarce; pupae abound, as do perfect insects. The list of my captures amounts to eighty males and fifty-eight females. The males, therefore, hitherto impossible to discover, either on the flowers around or in the neighbourhood of the burrows, could be picked up to-day by the hundred, if I wished.
So utterly helpless are the masters, that when Huber shut up thirty of them without a slave, but with plenty of the food which they like best, and with their larvae and pupae to stimulate them to work, they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves, and many perished of hunger. What can be more extraordinary than these well-ascertained facts?
Two more tubes are prepared, but this time supplied with fresh mould, lightly heaped up, which has not the incoherence of sand, with the attendant drawback of pressure. Six centimeters of mould give me eight flies for fifteen pupae buried; twenty centimeters give me only one. There is less success than with the sandy column.
Out of curiosity we opened some, and found in them large brown pupae. In the summer-house, under the wooden eaves, if you look, you will find the chrysalis of a butterfly, curiously slung aslant. Coming down Galley Hill, near Hastings, one day, a party was almost stopped by finding they could only walk on thousands of caterpillars, dark with bright yellow bands, which had sprung out of the grass.
The number of fertile ova obtained from Pyri moths was also more considerable than in former years, which was due partly to the good quality of the pupae, and partly to the very favorable weather in June, at the time the pairings of the moths took place. Leaving these, I now come to the North American species. Telea polyphemus.
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