Insect Adventures. Fabre Jean-Henri
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Название: Insect Adventures

Автор: Fabre Jean-Henri

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия:

isbn: 4057664635211

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ lead a careless existence, never work, and do not return to the clay houses except for a brief moment to woo the ladies; they have nothing to do with the housekeeping or the new nests. What they want is the nectar in the flower-cups, not mortar to build with. There are left the sisters, who will be the mothers of the next family. As sisters, they all have equal rights to the nest. They do not go by this rule, however. The nest belongs to the one who first takes possession of it. If any of the others or any neighbors dispute her ownership, she fights them until they have the worst of it and fly away, leaving her in peace.

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      All is not smooth sailing after the Mason-bee has finished building her dome of cells. It is then that a certain Stelis-wasp, much smaller than the Mason-bee, appears, looks carefully at the outside of the Mason-bee’s home, and makes up her mind, weak and small as she is, to introduce her eggs into this cement fortress. Everything is most carefully closed: a layer of rough plaster, at least two fifths of an inch thick, entirely covers the cells, which are each of them sealed with a thick mortar plug. The plaster is almost as hard as a rock. Never mind! The little insect is going to reach the honey in those cells.

       She pluckily sets to. Atom by atom, she drives a hole in the plaster and scoops out a shaft just large enough to let her through; she reaches the lid of the cell and gnaws it till she catches sight of the honey. It is a slow and painful process, in which the feeble Wasp wears herself out. I find it hard to break the plaster with the point of my knife. How much harder, then, for the insect, with her tiny pincers!

      When she reaches the honey, the Stelis-wasp slips through and, on the surface of the provisions, side by side with the Mason-bee’s, she lays a number of her own eggs. The honey-food will be the common property of all the new arrivals, the Stelis-wasp’s grubs as well as the Mason-bee’s.

      The next thing for the parasite Wasp to do is to wall up the opening she has made, so that other robbers cannot get in. At the foot of the nest, the Wasp collects a little red earth; she makes it into mortar by wetting it with saliva; and with the pellets thus prepared she fills up the entrance shaft as neatly as if she were a master-mason. The mortar, being red, shows up against the Bee’s house, which is white; so when we see the red speck on the pale background of the Bee’s nest we know a Stelis-wasp has been that way.

      As a result of the Stelis’ action, the poor Bee-baby will starve to death. The Wasp’s grubs mature first and eat up all the food.

when a Mason-bee has stayed too long among the flowers

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      Sometimes, when a Mason-bee has stayed too long among the flowers, getting honey for her cell, she finds the cell closed when she returns home. A neighbor Bee has taken the opportunity to lay her eggs there, after finishing the building and stocking it with provisions. The real Bee-owner is shut out.

      She does not hesitate long about what to do. After she has examined her former home very carefully, to make sure it is closed against her, she seems to say to herself, “An egg for an egg, a cell for a cell. You’ve stolen my house; I’ll steal yours.” She goes to another Bee’s dwelling and patiently gnaws the mortar lid or door. When she has made an opening, she stands bending over the cell, her head half-buried in it, as if thinking. She goes away, she returns undecidedly; at last she makes up her mind. The other Bees, meanwhile, pay no attention to her, not even the one who laid the egg in the cell.

The Bee who has turned burglar

      The Bee who has turned burglar snaps up the strange egg from the surface of the honey and flings it on the rubbish-heap as carelessly as if she were ridding the house of a bit of dirt. Then, although there is already plenty of honey in the cell, she adds more from her own stock, lays her own egg, and closes up the house again. The lid is repaired to look like new and everything restored to order. The Bee has had her revenge; her anger is appeased. Next time she lays an egg it will be in her own cell, unless that has again been seized by another.

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      I have told you about the robber Stelis-wasp who enters the Bee’s cement house and steals the provisions laid up for the Bee-baby; she is not the only one who despoils the poor Mason-bee. There is another Bee, the Dioxys, who acts in about the same way as the Stelis-wasp, except that she sometimes does even worse, and eats up the grub itself, as well as its honey. Then there are the Osmia-bees and the Leaf-cutting Bees, who make themselves very much at home in the Bees’ houses, when they get a chance, keeping out the real owners; and there are also three flies, whose grubs eat the Bee-grub alive! It sometimes seems wonderful that the Mason-bee should ever live to grow up; and you will be glad to hear of three other visitors the Bee-grub has, which actually help instead of making it impossible for it to live. These are three Beetles.

      The old nests which the Mason-bees build in, to save themselves the trouble of making new ones, are often in a very insanitary condition. The cells are full of dead larvæ (larva is another word for grub, and both words mean the first stage of the insect after leaving the egg, when it looks like a little worm), which, for some reason or other, could not break through their hard prisons; of honey which has not been eaten and has turned sour; of tattered cocoons, and shreds of skin, left behind when the grubs turned into Bees. All these dead and useless things are, of course, not pleasant to have in any house, especially in a tidy Bee’s.

      Here is where the Beetles come to the rescue. They enter the Bee’s house and lay their eggs there. The larvæ, when they come out of the eggs, begin to make themselves useful. Two species of larvæ gnaw the remains of the dead Bees; the third, which is quite a good-looking worm, with a black head and the rest of its body a pretty pink, takes care of the spoiled honey. This worm turns into a Beetle in a red dress with blue ornaments, whom you may often see strolling about the Bee’s house in the working season, tasting here and there drops of honey oozing from some cracked cell. The Bees leave him in peace, as if they knew that it was his duty to keep their house wholesome.

      Still later, when the Bee’s house, exposed as it is to wind and weather, cracks and falls to pieces almost entirely, the Bees leave it for good and all, and still other insects take possession of it. These are gypsies, who are not particular where they camp out. Spiders make their homes in the blind alleys which used to be cells, and weave white-satin screens, behind which they lie in wait for passing game. The Hunting-wasps arrange nooks with earthen embankments or clay partitions, and there store up small members of the Spider tribe as food for their families. So we see that the house that the Mason-bee built for herself is useful to many others, good, bad, or indifferent friends of hers as the case may be.

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      I wished to know something more about my Mason-bees. I had heard that they knew how to find their nests even if carried СКАЧАТЬ