Читать книгу Insect Adventures - Fabre Jean-Henri - Страница 9

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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.