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Updated: May 21, 2025
A like precaution is taken by the White-banded Sphex. Both observe the same diet and the same customs. The Tachytes clears the entrance to the home and goes in alone. She returns, puts out her head and, seizing her prey by the antennae, warehouses it by dragging backwards. I have repeated, at her expense, the tricks which I used to play on the Sphex. "The Hunting Wasps": chapter 11.
Save for the dispute with the Sphex, an unique event in my records as observer, I have seen all the rest many a time, but never anything more. The Black Tachytes, though the most frequent of all in my neighbourhood, remains a riddle to me. I know nothing of her dwelling, her larvae, her cocoons, her family-arrangements.
I offer the Tachytes, deprived of her Mantis, a small Grasshopper, whose hind-legs I amputate to prevent his leaping. The disabled Acridian jogs along the sand. The Wasp flies round him for a moment, casts a contemptuous glance upon the cripple and withdraws without attempting action.
From it emerges the tertiary larva, which, from a simple examination with the pocket-lens, appears to me, in its general features, identical with the secondary larva, the one which eats the Tachytes' provisions. It is naked and pale-yellow, the colour of butter. It is active and wriggles with awkward movements. Ordinarily it lies upon its side, but it can also stand in the normal position.
As for the other, it must be eliminated: its extreme rarity in my neighbourhood is a sufficient reason. It is tiresome that the diet of the Aramon Meloid is not known. If I allowed myself to be guided by analogy, I should be inclined to regard Schreber's Cerocoma as a parasite of Tachytes tarsina, who buries her hoards of young Locusts in the high sandy banks.
Let a Bembex-wasp return from the chase, with her Gad-fly; a Philanthus, with her Bee; a Cerceris, with her Weevil; a Tachytes, with her Locust: straightway the parasites are there, coming and going, turning and twisting with the Wasp, always at her rear, without allowing themselves to be put off by any cautious feints.
For she is always there, in the few observations which chance affords me. A subterranean excursion would not attract the Wasp if it had no object. And its object is certainly the search for some sort of game for her larvae. The inference becomes inevitable: the Anathema Tachytes, who explores the Mole-cricket's galleries, gives her larvae this same Mole-cricket as their food.
When the time comes we will discover the reason for these differences in the rations served. The Mantis-killing Tachytes wears a red scarf, like her kinswoman, Panzer's Tachytes. This species may well be new to our fauna.
In all three cases, from the point of view of long-maintained freshness and of the signs of life proved by slight movements, the resemblance between my victim and those of the predatory insects is so great that no Sphex and no Tachytes would have disowned the product of my devices.
"Bramble-bees and Others" by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapters 12 to 14. Any adult Acridian approaching an inch in length suits the White-banded Sphex. The various tidae of the neighbourhood are admitted to the larder of Stizus ruficornis and of the Mantis-hunting Tachytes on the sole condition of being young and tender. "The Hunting Wasps": chapter 14.
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