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Updated: June 10, 2025
The room was recognised as an empty room, with no previous examination, such as would apparently be necessary to contradict the memory of the place. A more positive guide than memory called them elsewhere. Hitherto the female was always visible, behind the meshes of the wire-gauze cover.
The arrivals alighted on the dome of the wire-gauze cover, crowding eagerly about the prisoner; others, saluting her in passing, flew to the lamp, circled round it a few times, and then, fascinated by the luminous splendour radiating from the opal cone of light, clung there motionless under the reflector. Already the children were raising their hands to seize them.
I learn by inserting a straw that it is inhabited by a Tarantula of a size suited to my plans. The soil around the aperture is cleared and flattened to receive the wire-gauze, under which I place a Pompilus. This is the time to light a pipe and wait, lying on the pebbles...Yet another disappointment.
How much more comprehensible and interesting their life would become! But "when the hymenopteron breaks its cocoon, where are its masters! Its predecessors have long ago disappeared. How then can it receive education by example?" Let us return to Fabre's laboratory, to the covers of wire-gauze, and note what becomes, at the approach of winter, of the survivors of the vespine city.
A Cabbage Butterfly far exceeds the capacity of the Empusa's stomach. The Ants will benefit by what is left. There is one other matter to be mentioned, before observing the metamorphosis. The position adopted by the young Empusae in the wire-gauze cage is invariably the same from start to finish.
Mutilated or intact, they could do no more on account of age, and their absence meant nothing. Owing to the delay inseparable from the experiment, the part played by the antennæ escaped me. It was doubtful before; it remained doubtful. My prisoner under the wire-gauze cover lived for eight days. Every night she attracted a swarm of visitors, now to one part of the house, now to another.
If he comes to those parts, he must be careful not to leave his feet or hands out of bed without mosquito curtains; if he has good horses, he ought not to leave them exposed at night without wire-gauze round the stable-shed a plan which, to my surprise, I never saw used in the West Indies.
This plant was apparently one of the Cruciferae, more or less seasoned with sulpheretted essence, like the cabbages. Let us experiment on these lines. Penned in a large wire-gauze bell-cage, they accept this provender without demur; they nibble it with the same appetite as if it were cabbage; and they end by producing chrysalids and Butterflies. The change of fare causes not the least trouble.
In my cages I see nothing of the sort. Once the first excitement due to incarceration under the bell-glass or the wire-gauze cover has passed, the Bee seems hardly to trouble about her formidable neighbour. I see one side by side with the Philanthus on the same honeyed thistle-head: assassin and future victim are drinking from the same flask.
I repeated the experiment with the Oak Eggar. This time I used all the resources of scent and stench that my knowledge of drugs would permit. A dozen saucers were arranged, some in the interior of the wire-gauze cover, the prison of the female, and some around it, in an unbroken circle.
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