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Updated: May 12, 2025
They thrust only when the point beneath the sting is precisely that at which the wound will produce its full effect. The Two-banded Scolia in particular will struggle with the Cetonia-grub for half an hour at a time to enable herself to drive in the stiletto at the right spot. Wearied by an endless scuffle, one of my captives committed before my eyes a slight blunder, an unprecedented thing.
Unable to move on a flat surface, because of its short and feeble legs, deprived moreover of the Cetonia-larva's eccentric means of travelling on its back, the portly grub has no thought of fleeing; it coils itself up. The Scolia, with her powerful pincers, grips its skin now here, now elsewhere.
I say excess, for to-day, instructed by long experience, I have quite recovered from my former fears; and, when I see a Scolia resting on a thistle-head, I do not scruple to take her in my fingers, without any precaution whatever, however large she may be and however menacing her aspect. My courage is not all that it seems to be; I am quite ready to tell the Wasp-hunting novice this.
And, in the first place, how was it that the Scolia of antiquity, having to provide rations for her carnivorous family, adopted for her prey only those larvae which, owing to the concentration of their nervous systems, form so remarkable and so rare an exception in the insect order? What chance would hazard offer her of obtaining this prey, the most suitable of all because the most vulnerable?
Not knowing how to eat it according to rule, the larva will kill it; and by next day the victuals will have become so much toxic putrescence. I have already told how I found it impossible to rear the Two-banded Scolia on Oryctes-larvae, fastened down to deprive them of movement, or even on Ephippigers, paralysed by the Languedocian Sphex.
From now onwards, these remains may rot if they will: the Scolia, by its methodical fashion of consuming its victuals, has succeeded in keeping them fresh to the very last; and now you may see it, replete, shining with health, withdraw its long neck from the bag of skin and prepare to weave the cocoon in which its development will be completed.
You shall have them! First I call to witness the Interrupted Scolia. If the reader no longer has her method of operating in mind, I will beg him to refresh his memory. The two adversaries, in the preliminary conflict, may be fairly well represented by two rings interlocked not in the same plane but at right angles.
Let us agree that the Scolia of antiquity sought a different prey from that adopted by the modern huntress. If the family throve upon a diet now discontinued, we fail to see that the descendants had any reason to change it: animals have not the gastronomic fancies of an epicure whom satiety makes difficult to please.
The sporule of a scrap of moss requires an antherozoid before it is fit to germinate; and the ovule of a Scolia, that proud huntress, can dispense with the equivalent in order to hatch and produce a male? These new-fangled theories seem to me to have very little value.
Suddenly it curls up; with a stroke of its head it hurls the enemy to a distance. Undiscouraged by all her set-backs, the Wasp picks herself up, brushes her wings and resumes her attack upon the colossus, almost always by mounting the larva's hinder end. At last after all these fruitless attempts, the Scolia succeeds in achieving the correct position.
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