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Updated: June 3, 2025
But, through some strange inadvertence, the amelioration nature imposes suppresses the life of even the fittest, and the Sitaris Colletes would have long since disappeared had not chance, acting in opposition to the desires of nature, permitted isolated individuals to escape from the excellent and far-seeing law that ordains on all sides the triumph of the stronger.
After this act of brigandage, which may be compared with that of the primary larva of the Sitaris ripping open and drinking the contents of the Anthophora's egg, the Meloid, now the sole possessor of the victuals, doffs its battle array and becomes the pot-bellied grub, the consumer of the property so brutally acquired. These are merely suspicions on my part, nothing more.
Does the female go from cell to cell, confiding an egg to the succulent flanks of each larva, whether this larva belong to the Anthophora or to a parasite of hers, as the mysterious shell whence the Sitaris emerges would incline one to believe? This method of laying the eggs, one at a time in each cell, would appear to be essential, if we are to explain the facts already ascertained.
Everything happens as if the larva of the Sitaris, from the moment it was hatched, knew that the male Anthophora would first emerge from the passage; that the nuptial flight would give it the means of conveying itself to the female, who would take it to a store of honey sufficient to feed it after its transformation; that, until this transformation, it could gradually eat the egg of the Anthophora, in such a way that it could at the same time feed itself, maintain itself at the surface of the honey, and also suppress the rival that otherwise would have come out of the egg.
He states that Sitaris lays its eggs near the entrance of bees' nests, and at the very moment that the bee lays her egg in the honey cell, the flattened, ovate Sitaris larva drops from the body of the bee upon which it has been living, and feasts upon the contents of the freshly laid egg.
How many of these stray travellers must be lost; how many will never be carried into a warehouse full of honey, their sole food! Therefore, to remedy this enormous waste, the mother produces an innumerable family. The Oil-beetle's batch of eggs is prodigious. Prodigious too is that of the Sitaris, who is exposed to similar misadventures.
The most nearly complete instances that I have seen furnishes me with the following data: the pseudochrysalis is very closely enveloped in the skin of the secondary larva, a skin consisting of fine transparent pellicle, without any rent whatever. This is the pouch of the Sitaris, save that it lies in immediate contact with the body enclosed.
This becomes very evident if we study another related beetle; it is called the Sitaris colletis, and lives at the expense of the hymenopterous Colletes, as its relative at the expense of the Anthophora. But these two species of the same genus are very unequally aided by chance.
However, the Sitaris remains still a fortnight in the intact shell, ejecting at intervals white droppings of uric acid, which it pushes back together with the shreds of its last two sloughs, those of the tertiary larva and of the nymph.
This series of circumstances results only in the introduction of a single Sitaris into a chamber; the moment which must be profited by is too short for many of them to seize. If the female Anthophora carries others hidden in her hairs, they are obliged to await a new hatching to let themselves glide off.
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