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Updated: June 3, 2025
Hatched in the nests of bees, it at first attaches itself to one of the males, and then crawls, when the opportunity offers, upon a female bee. When the female bee lays her eggs, the young sitaris springs upon them and devours them.
We shall find tendencies, impulses, preferences, efforts, intentions, "Machiavellic ruses and unheard-of stratagems." Certain miserable black mites, living specks, the larvae of a beetle, one of the Meloidae, the Sitaris, are parasites of the solitary bee, the Anthophora.
We cannot but think, from observations made on the humble bee, the wasp, two species of moths and several other insects, that this "hyper-metamorphosis" is not so abnormal a mode of insect metamorphosis as has been supposed, and that the changes of these insects, made beneath the skin of the mature larva before assuming the pupa state, are almost as remarkable as those of Meloë and Sitaris, though less easily observed than they.
In the first case it is alone, and may develop with certainty; in the second, on the contrary, several Sitaris penetrate the chamber and climb up to attack the egg, which in this case also must be their first food. This rivalry causes a struggle to the death. If one of the larvæ is notably more vigorous than its rivals, it may free itself from them and survive.
Presently both sloughs, those of the Sitaris and the egg, will disappear, submerged under the waves of honey which the new larva is about to raise. Here ends the history of the first form adopted by the Sitaris.
They speak, moreover, of a precarious, risky parasitism, wherein the Meloid is not sure of finding its food, which the Sitaris finds so deftly, getting itself carried by the Anthophora, after being born at the very entrance to the Bee's galleries and leaving its retreat only to slip into its host's fleece.
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.
He fills each of them with honey, places in it an egg which floats in the midst of this little lake of nectar, and closes it all up. The Sitaris covets this honey to nourish its offspring, and the chamber to shelter it.
Although the Sitaris, on assuming the form of the pseudochrysalis, is transfigured outwardly to the point of baffling the science of entomological phases, this is not so inwardly.
In the first batch, which, it is true, is the most prolific of all, Meloe proscarabæus, according to Newport's calculations, produces the astonishing number of 4,218 eggs, which is double the number of eggs laid by a Sitaris. And what must the number be, when we allow for the two or three batches that follow the first!
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