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Updated: May 19, 2025
According to the Italian observer Passerini, the Garden Scolia feeds her family on the larvae of Oryctes nasicornis, in the heaps of old tan-waste removed from the hot-houses. I do not despair of seeing this colossal Wasp coming to establish herself one day in my heaps of leaf-mould, in which the same Scarabaeid is swarming.
I examined this shred of skin with all the care that it deserved. My first suspicions were confirmed: a Lamellicorn, a Scarabaeid in the larval state, is the first food of the Wasp whose cocoon I have just unearthed. But which of the Scarabaeidae? And does this cocoon, my precious booty, really belong to the Scoliae? The problem is beginning to take shape.
I found a few cocoons, nearly all broken, like the one which I already possessed, and, like it, bearing on their side the tattered skin of a larva of the same Scarabaeid. Two of these cocoons which are still intact contained a dead adult Wasp. This was actually the Two-banded Scolia, a precious discovery which changed my suspicions into a certainty.
As for the Euchlora, she is not involved in the problem: the larva hunted by the Two-banded Scolia does not belong to her any more than it belongs to the Anoxia. Then with which Scarabaeid does the empty skin which is still unknown to me correspond? The Lamellicorn whom I am seeking must exist in the ground which I have been exploring, because the Two-banded Scolia has established herself there.
The chance represented by unity compared with the indefinite number of entomological species. The odds are as one to immensity. Let us continue. The larva of the Scarabaeid is snapped up underground, for the first time. The victim protests, defends itself after its fashion, coils itself up and presents to the sting on every side a surface on which a wound entails no serious danger.
From another point of view again, the Darwinian theory is at variance with the Scoliae and their prey. In the heap of garden mould which I exploited in order to write this record, three kinds of larvae dwell together, belonging to the Scarabaeid group: the Cetonia, the Oryctes and Scarabeus pentodon.
If you know the lily, you may name as a Crioceris the tiny scarlet Scarabaeid that inhabits it and peoples its leaves with larvae which keep themselves cool beneath an overcoat of ordure. "The Glow-worm and Other Beetles," by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapters 16 and 17.
I note the presence of a second bearer of the nasal horn, Oryctes Silenus, who is much smaller than her kinswoman, and of Pentodon punctatus, a Scarabaeid who ravages my lettuces. But the predominant population consists of Cetoniae, or Rosechafers, most of them enclosed in their egg-shaped shells, with earthen walls encrusted with dung.
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