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Updated: May 31, 2025
All has not been told concerning the Meloidæ, those strange parasites, some of which, the Sitares and the Oil-beetles, attach themselves, like the tiniest of Lice, to the fleece of various Bees to get themselves carried into the cell where they will destroy the egg and afterwards feed upon the ration of honey.
Some Anthophoræ which were free from these grubs and some others which were carrying five or six upon their bodies were placed separately in glass jars. When the first disturbance resulting from their captivity was appeased, I could see nothing peculiar about those occupied by the young Sitares.
In the Sitares, the successive casts are not ruptured and remain enclosed inside one another, but with an interval between, so that the tertiary larva can move and turn as it wishes in its multiple enclosure. In the Zonites, there is the same arrangement, with this difference, that, until the nymph appears, there is no empty space between one slough and the next. The tertiary larva cannot budge.
To satisfy those two indispensable conditions, the arrival of the larva upon the egg without crossing the honey and the introduction of a single larva among all those waiting in the fleece of the Bee, there can be only one explanation, which is to suppose that, at the moment when the Anthophora's egg is half out of the oviduct, one of the Sitares which have hastened from the thorax to the tip of the abdomen, one more highly favoured by its position, instantly settles upon the egg, a bridge too narrow for two, and with it reaches the surface of the honey.
The larvæ of the Sitares, like those of the Oil-beetles, cling like grim death to the fleece of their generous host and make him carry them into the cell.
The history of this tiny creature we know. The second cell also was full of honey. On the sticky liquid floated a little white larva, about a sixth of an inch in length and very different from the other little white larvæ belonging to Sitares. The rapid fluctuations of the abdomen showed that it was eagerly drinking the strong-scented nectar collected by the Bee.
With these data, rendered still more striking by what I was learning daily on the subject of the Sitares, I went to Carpentras, on the 21st of May, to inspect the nests of the Anthophoræ, then building, as I have described.
Here the Sitares store up their uric waste products; here the Capricorns collect the chalky paste which becomes the stone lid for the entrance to the cell; here caterpillars keep in reserve the gums and powders with which they strengthen the cocoon; hence the Hymenoptera draw the lacquer which they employ to upholster their silken edifice.
Apart from the general configuration, it will be seen that we have here the strikingly characteristic appearance of the pseudochrysalids of the Sitares, Oil-beetles and Zonites.
This is enough, I think, to prove that the grub is not a strict stay-at-home, as are the larvæ of the Sitares and the Oil-beetles when devouring the ration of the Anthophora. I imagine that, in the burrows of the Tachytes, the grub, when its heap of Mantes is consumed, moves from cell to cell until it has satisfied its appetite.
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