Читать книгу The Insect Man - Eleanor Doorly - Страница 9

Mrs. Digger-Wasp digs; Mr. Digger-Wasp does not. He is a frail, half-sized little person, who dances with his wife, fights his rival, rolls him in the dust and then flies off with his lady. First he enjoys a quiet honeymoon and then he buzzes around her house while she does all the work. He is never allowed inside. She digs a hole perhaps half a yard deep, all the time carting out obstructions with her mouth, so that perhaps we ought to say mouthing out. She claws out the sides of the walls and sweeps out the dust with her legs, walking backwards.

Then she sets out to hunt food, which she is going to store in her larder for her babies. She herself feeds on the juice of flowers, but she knows that her children must eat meat. So she captures a big beetle for them nearly twice the weight of herself.

It is easy to tell you about it, but how did Fabre manage to find out these things? Just try to picture him making his discoveries about Mrs. Digger-Wasp. I suppose he knew her by sight. There are a great many different digger-wasps and a still greater number of kinds of wasps. If anyone were to say to you: “How many kinds of wild blackberries are there in England?” You would answer: “Three or perhaps four” and be dumbfounded when the scientist tells you the truth—that there are about five hundred. When you are thinking of kinds of living things always remember that. It may look to you as if there are about three kinds of digger-wasps, but remember there are much more likely to be a great many.

So Fabre watches a road with a steep bank, which we are going to see, and, on the bank, he notices threads of dust hanging down. That’s the dust Mrs. Digger-Wasp has swept out. Fabre traces a thread upwards and he finds her doorway under a porch. She likes a porch to protect her home from rain—but I wonder how many threads of dust he has to trace upwards before he knows that there is an overhanging cornice, small or large, over every digger-wasp’s front door? Next, perhaps he digs himself; because he would like to know what her house is like. It is wide, the width of a thumb; it is long! Very long. You try digging into the rockery for half a yard tracing carefully a narrow tunnel, which winds in unsuspected directions. It is no use doing it once; you might have lighted on an exception. Fabre did it perhaps a hundred times, perhaps more.

How long does he sit in the burning sun of the South watching to see if Mr. Digger-Wasp does any work? It would be unfair to judge him on the conduct of one day or the behaviour of one of the species. Fabre takes no chances, makes no hasty judgments. Remember the long, long, motionless waits in the sun.

But wasps fly ... and Fabre runs after, certainly not along the path, but under the olive trees, through the branches and thickets of dry weeds, over dry river-beds, stumbling on the stones. He has to see the rivals meet and fight. Have, you ever seen it? I never have.

Then he sits again watching to see how Mrs. Digger-Wasp digs. Perhaps, he thinks, she will do all this just as well if he gives her a bank in a box in his study. He makes the box, makes the soil just of the right kind, hardens it, or crumbles it. All hard work! Then, perhaps, he finds that the work won’t satisfy my lady. He begins again.

What is all her digging for? There’s something in her house. Right to the farthest, innermost cell Fabre must penetrate and there he finds something interesting: five large beetles, dead. Dead! Dead? They are full of colours; they are quite, quite fresh; their limbs are movable; try certain tests and the things wave their legs about for a short time. Very unlike the dead! Yet, unlike the living! For, left to themselves, they are quite, quite motionless.

In watching the holes, Fabre has often seen Mrs. Digger-Wasp arriving with such a beetle almost twice as large as herself in her hands. She has queer ideas about coming home; she flies to within a certain distance and then she walks. “Those beetles aren’t dead,” says Fabre to himself; “in spite of what the greatest of entomologists says, the wasp’s sting hasn’t poisoned them. If it had, they would rot; besides they are very strong fellows, those particular beetles, they can live for a month with a collector’s pin through them, but they kick all the time. What is the meaning of this stillness and this complete livingness?”

Fabre must see Mrs. Digger-Wasp catch her victim, must see what she does to him to make him still. Well, he had never seen her catch a beetle; so up he gets and runs again, after Mrs. Digger-Wasp. There she goes, here, there, everywhere, through the lambent air, hard to see and harder to follow. Fabre decides to catch the beetle instead, because beetles walk. But where are they? She brings them in any time after ten minutes’ search, he spends four days and brings in three. Hers are splendid, perfect, without a sign of having been hunted; his are dusty and rather worn, but alive. She too is very spruce; he worn to a frazzle. He suggests we ought to respect insects after such a proof of superiority to man in the matter of catching beetles. Then he puts his shabby beetle to walk about near Mrs. Digger-Wasp’s den.... Out she comes, sees the prey, walks over it and flies away to get something eatable.

Poor Fabre was as disappointed as a nice child. But he was a really bright fellow. He slipped on his thinking-cap and decided that there are moments when even human beings take the second best, moments when they haven’t time to think; as Giles, when he is late for school, instead of his new cap, snatches the one that had spent a week in the pond. Just as Mrs. Digger-Wasp lands with her lovely prey in her hands, Fabre drags it away from her with a pair of pincers. She is furious of course; stamps, turns, sees the shabby living beetle and seizes that. But it moves! She doesn’t drop it saying: “I have killed you once.” Even Fabre can’t tell us what explanation she finds for the funny change. But it doesn’t matter! She turns her body under the back of the beetle, who, you remember, is being carried upside down, presses his back with her feet till she opens one of his joints—then she jabs the space a few times with her sting. The beetle is instantaneously still. He will stay still for a month without decay or other sign of death. Fabre takes him from his clever slayer and gives her another live beetle. In the end he has his three stilled beetles to examine and finds that, though he knows the exact spot in which they have been struck, he cannot see any injury whatever. He knows no poison ever acted like that. He guesses that Mrs. Digger-Wasp has a knowledge of anatomy far more accurate than his own; that she knows all about a beetle’s nervous system.

Fabre goes to books, to the microscope, and finds out that, though most beetles have three nervous centres, when to strike one will not render motionless the others, this particular beetle has only one nerve centre and that is just at the spot where the wasp struck. Put that centre out of action and the whole beetle is still, paralysed, but alive! This particular wasp knows the make-up of the nervous system of its own particular beetle.

Do you want proof that Fabre was right? He learns the wasp’s dodge; he too strikes the beetle in her nerve centre. She is instantaneously still; the trick works when a man does it. But, alas, Fabre has not done it as well as Mrs. Digger-Wasp; after a time, his beetle dies.

Now he knows that the little helpless grub who awakens from the egg on a motionless beetle in its deep hidden cave can begin to eat exactly where its mother laid her egg; its meat will make no objection; it is alive and succulent, but it cannot roll the grub off or flick it with a leg. It lies quite still and is eaten to a shell. When the grub has grown, he can move on for himself to the next beetle and find it also still fresh and very good.

“Let us go,” said Giles, “I would not mind if I had had the chance to help Mr. Fabre to watch his digger-wasps. That’s the kind of man I would like to know.”