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Updated: June 14, 2025
Never will the wasp take that unwieldy insect for one of her own kind. The difference is too great. Poor Volucella, mimesis has not taught you enough. You ought this is the essential point to have adopted a wasp's shape; and that you forgot to do: you remained a fat fly, easily recognizable.
In a word, the grubs of the Volucella "are the nurses of the larvae," performing the most intimate duties." What an astonishing conclusion! What a disconcerting and unexpected reply to the "theories in vogue"!
For a couple of hours, I fix my attention on a Volucella grub established in a cell, side by side with the Wasp grub, the mistress of the house. The hind quarters emerge, displaying their papillae. Sometimes also the fore part, the head, shows, bending from side to side with sudden, snake-like motions.
To thwart this vigilance, the real enemies need to be masters of the art of deceptive immobility and cunning disguise. But there is no deception about the Volucella grub. It comes and goes, openly, wheresoever it will; it looks round amongst the wasps for cells to suit it. What has it to make itself thus respected? Strength? Certainly not.
Forthwith grabbed, bruised and riddled with stings, the poor wretches perish. It is quite a different matter with the offspring of the Volucella. They come and go as they please, poke about in the cells, elbow the inhabitants and remain unmolested. Let us give some instances of this clemency, which is very strange in the irascible Wasp.
If the latter really meant to deceive the Wasp by her appearance, we must admit that her disguise is none too successful. Yellow sashes round the abdomen do not make a wasp. It would need more than that and, above all, a slender figure and a nimble carriage; and the Volucella is thickset and corpulent and sedate in her movements.
She is at once recognized as a stranger and attacked and slaughtered with the same vigor as the larvae of the Hylotoma sawfly and the Saperda beetle, neither of which bears any outward resemblance to the larva of the wasps. Seeing that identity of shape and costume does not save the Polistes, how will the Volucella fare, with her clumsy imitation?
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