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Updated: May 31, 2025
It will be the starting-point of a chapter which perhaps will give us some fresh sidelights upon the history of the hypermetamorphosis. The larva is nearly 2 millimetres long. Coming out of a good-sized egg, it is endowed with greater vigour than the larvæ of the Sitares and Oil-beetles. The head is large, rounded, slightly wider than the prothorax and of a rather brighter red.
This suspicion seems to me to be well-founded, for the size which the larva finally attains exceeds the proportions which the small quantity of honey enclosed in a single cell would lead us to expect. Let us go back to the pseudochrysalis. It is, as in the Sitares, an inert body, of a horny consistency, amber-coloured and divided into thirteen segments, including the head.
Thus, on visiting the dwellings of the Anthophoræ for the last time, on the 25th of June, I found that the Bee's larvæ had all finished their rations and attained their full development, whereas those of the Sitares, still immersed in the honey, were, for the most part, only half the size which they must finally attain.
This done, the organism becomes transformed to such a degree that repeated observations are required to make us believe the evidence of our eyes. I interrupt the history of the Sitares to speak of the Meloes, those uncouth Beetles, with their clumsy belly and their limp wing-cases yawning over their back like the tails of a fat man's coat that is far too tight for its wearer.
This explains the presence here, the pairing and the egg-laying of the Sitares whom we but now saw roaming, in the company of the Anthrax-flies, at the entrance to the galleries of the Anthophoræ. The Osmia and the Anthophora, the joint owners of the premises, have each their parasite: the Anthrax attacks the Osmia and the Sitaris the Anthophora.
I could not say positively how long the Oil-beetle remains in the pseudochrysalid form; but, if we consider the very complete analogy between the evolution of the Oil-beetles and that of the Sitares, there is reason to believe that a few pseudochrysalids complete their transformation in the same year, while others, in greater numbers, remain stationary for a whole year and do not attain the state of the perfect insect until the following spring.
Well, I never found anything that I could detach; I never succeeded in extracting a larva in its tertiary form, though this larva is so easily obtained from the amber pouches of the Sitares and, in the Oil-beetles and Cerocomæ, emerges of its own accord from the split wrapper of the pseudochrysalis.
In support of these deductions, here is a fairly conclusive experiment, though it reproduces the natural circumstances but roughly. On a female taken in her cell and therefore free from Sitares, I place a male who is infested with them; and I keep the two sexes in contact, suppressing their unruly movements as far as I am able.
The shell is easily broken; a few strokes of the mandibles, distributed at random, a few kicks are enough to deliver the perfect insect from its fragile prison. In the glass jars in which I kept my Sitares I saw the pairing follow very closely upon the first moments of freedom.
Everything assured me that I was on the track of an insect that rivalled the Sitares and the Oil-beetles in the strangeness of its transformations; and, what was a still more precious fact, its occurrence amid the burrows of the Mantis-killer told me that its habits would be wholly different. "It's very hot, my poor Émile; we are both of us pretty done.
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