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Updated: June 29, 2025
This determines the selection of Weevils and Buprestes, both of which are so strongly armoured.
This quilted lining, of which the Cerambyx of the Oak showed us the first example, is, it seems to me, pretty often employed by the wood-eaters, Buprestes as well as Longicorns. After these migrants, which travel from the centre of the tree to the surface, we will mention some others which from the surface plunge into the interior.
The Buprestes, as zealous as the Longicorns in the destruction of trees, whether sound or ailing, tell us the same tale as the Cerambyx- and Saperda-beetles. Her larva gnaws the interior of the trunk.
Black above, the Mimic Geotrupes is the colour of copper pyrites below; also black in all parts exposed to the light of day, the Stercoraceous Geotrupes displays a ventral surface of a glorious amethyst violet. Many other series, of greatly varied habits, Carabi, Cetoniæ, Buprestes, Chrysomelæ, rival and even surpass the magnificent Dung-beetles in the matter of jewellery.
Its costume, if it has not the metallic splendour dear to the Scarabæi, the Buprestes and the rose-beetles, is at least unusually elegant. A black or chestnut background is thickly sown with capriciously shaped spots of white velvet; a fashion both modest and handsome.
Where are the twelve cubic inches of earth that represent the average volume of the original contents of the shaft? There is not a trace of this material outside, nor inside either. And how, in a soil as dry as a cinder, is the plaster made with which the walls are covered? Larvæ which burrow in wood, such as those of Capricornis and Buprestes, will apparently answer our first question.
After these exclusive ones, who disdain to vary their meals, let us mention the eclectics, who, in a group which is generally well-defined, are able to select among different kinds of game appropriate to their bulk. Cf. "The Hunting Wasps": chapters 2 and 3. The Buprestis-hunting Cerceris adopts all the Buprestes indiscriminately, so long as they are not beyond her strength.
In a word, the victims of Cerceris, far from being desiccated or putrefied, were found in a state of integrity which was altogether paradoxical. Dufour merely believed that the Buprestes were dead, and he gave an attempted explanation of the phenomenon.
And that, no doubt, is why it took me two sittings of four hours apiece to witness three assassinations. Formerly, instructed by the paralysing Wasps, I had myself tried to produce paralysis by injecting a drop of ammonia into the thorax of those insects, such as Weevils, Buprestes, and Dung-beetles, whose compact nervous system assists this physiological operation.
Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an inventory of the nest of a Cerceris. For him the Buprestes were dead, and their state of preservation was explained simply as a kind of embalming, due to some special action of the venom of the Hymenoptera.
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