The Mason-Bees by Jean-Henri Fabre

Author:Jean-Henri Fabre [Fabre, Jean-Henri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mason bees
Published: 2001-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8. PARASITES.

In August or September, let us go into some gorge with bare and sun-scorched sides. When we find a slope well-baked by the summer heat, a quiet corner with the temperature of an oven, we will call a halt: there is a fine harvest to be gathered there. This tropical land is the native soil of a host of Wasps and Bees, some of them busily piling the household provisions in underground warehouses: here a stack of Weevils, Locusts or Spiders, there a whole assortment of Flies, Bees, Mantes or Caterpillars, while others are storing up honey in membranous wallets or clay pots, or else in cottony bags or urns made with the punched-out disks of leaves.

With the industrious folk who go quietly about their business, the labourers, masons, foragers, warehousers, mingles the parasitic tribe, the prowlers hurrying from one home to the next, lying in wait at the doors, watching for a favourable opportunity to settle their family at the expense of others.

A heart-rending struggle, in truth, is that which rules the insect world and in a measure our own world too. No sooner has a worker, by dint of exhausting labour, amassed a fortune for his children than the non-producers come hastening up to contend for its possession. To one who amasses there are sometimes five, six or more bent upon his ruin; and often it ends not merely in robbery but in black murder. The worker's family, the object of so much care, for whom that home was built and those provisions stored, succumb, devoured by the intruders, directly the little bodies have acquired the soft roundness of youth. Shut up in a cell that is closed on every side, protected by its silken covering, the grub, once its victuals are consumed, sinks into a profound slumber, during which the organic changes needed for the future transformation take place. For this new hatching, which is to turn a grub into a Bee, for this general remodelling, the delicacy of which demands absolute repose, all the precautions that make for safety have been taken.

These precautions will be foiled. The enemy will succeed in penetrating the impregnable fortress; each foe has his special tactics, contrived with appalling skill. See, an egg is inserted by means of a probe beside the torpid larva; or else, in the absence of such an implement, an infinitesimal grub, an atom, comes creeping and crawling, slips in and reaches the sleeper, who will never wake again, already a succulent morsel for her ferocious visitor. The interloper makes the victim's cell and cocoon his own cell and his own cocoon; and next year, instead of the mistress of the house, there will come from below ground the bandit who usurped the dwelling and consumed the occupant.

Look at this one, striped black, white and red, with the figure of a clumsy, hairy Ant. She explores the slope on foot, inspects every nook and corner, sounds the soil with her antennae. She is a Mutilla, the scourge of the cradled grubs.

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