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Updated: June 17, 2025
Thus enclosed with the egg of the Anthophora and its provision of honey, the larva has no other rival to fear, and may alone utilise the whole store. This parasitism has to such an extent become a habit with the species, that the larva's organisation has become modified by it. At the moment when it falls into the cell it cannot feed on honey.
The building-materials are the same: sand and silk; the surroundings amid which the two artisans work are the same: a cell in a soil of sandy gravel; yet each of the builders possesses its individual art, its own plan, its one method. The nature of the food has no more effect upon the larva's talents than the environment in which it lives or the materials employed.
How many were there on the larva's back? Perhaps eight, ten or more. One Midge, never more than one, comes out of the victim's skin, for the morsel is too small to provide food for many. What has become of the others? Has there been an internecine battle inside the poor wretch's body?
Some of them already contain the cocoon, which is slender and semitransparent, like those of the Cerceris, and, like them, suggests the shape of certain homoeopathic phials, with oval bellies surmounted by a tapering neck. The cocoon is fastened to the end of the cell by the tip of this neck, which is darkened and hardened by the larva's excrement; it has no other support.
Thus endowed, will she be capable of meting out the future's larva's portion? By no means. The Bee does not know what that portion is. There is nothing to tell the materfamilias; and yet, at her first attempt, she fills the honey-pot to the requisite depth. True, in her childhood she received a similar ration, but she consumed it in the darkness of a cell; and besides, as a grub, she was blind.
And yet the Wasp, an absolute novice, has to select, for the thrust of its poisoned weapon, one single point, narrowly restricted and hidden in the folds of the larva's body. If she miscalculates, she may be killed: the larva, irritated by the smarting puncture, is strong enough to disembowel her with the tusks of its mandibles.
A little later, the harvester is again a mason; and these alternations continue until the cell is of the regulation height and holds the amount of honey required for the larva's food.
Owing to her transversal position, the assailant is now free to aim her weapon in a slightly slanting direction, whether towards the head or towards the thorax, at the same point of entry in the larva's throat. Between the two opposite slants of the sting, which is itself very short, what can the distance be? That is very little.
From this parallel it seems to me to follow that the conditions of life in which men see to-day the origin of instincts the type of food, the surroundings amid which the larval life is passed, the materials available for a defensive wrapper and other factors which the evolutionists are accustomed to invoke have no actual influence upon the larva's industry.
The animal is not the moving body of the mathematicians, the particle of matter guided in its trajectory solely by the motive forces and the resistance of the medium traversed; it bears within itself conditions which control the others. The adult insect does not even enjoy the larva's privileges; it cannot bend freely in all directions. Under its harness it is almost a stiff cylinder.
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