第54章 CHAPTER XI THE BUMBLEBEE FLY(1)

Underneath the wasp's brown paper manor house, the ground is channeled into a sort of drain for the refuse of the nest. Here are shot the dead or weakly larvae which a continual inspection roots out from the cells to make room for fresh occupants; here, at the time of the autumn massacre, are flung the backward grubs;here, lastly, lies a good part of the crowd killed by the first touch of winter. During the rack and ruin of November and December, this sewer becomes crammed with animal matter.

Such riches will not remain unemployed. The world's great law which says that nothing edible shall be wasted provides for the consumption of a mere ball of hair disgorged by the owl. How shall it be with the vast stores of a ruined wasps' nest! If they have not come yet, the consumers whose task it is to salve this abundant wreckage for nature's markets, they will not tarry in coming and waiting for the manna that will soon descend from above. That public granary, lavishly stocked by death, will become a busy factory of fresh life. Who are the guests summoned to the banquet?

If the wasps flew away, carrying the dead or sickly grubs with them, and dropped them on the ground round about their home, those banqueters would be, first and foremost, the insect-eating birds, the warblers, all of whom are lovers of small game. In this connection, we will allow ourselves a brief digression. We all know with what jealous intolerance the nightingales occupy each his own cantonment. Neighborly intercourse among them is tabooed. The males frequently exchange defiant couplets at a distance; but, should the challenged party draw near, the challenger makes him clear off. Now, not far from my house, in a scanty clump of holly oaks which would barely give the woodcutter the wherewithal for a dozen faggots, I used, all through the spring, to hear such full-throated warbling of nightingales that the songs of those virtuosi, all giving voice at once and with no attempt at order, degenerated into a deafening hubbub.

Why did those passionate devotees of solitude come and settle in such large numbers at a spot where custom decrees that there is just room enough for one household only? What reasons have made the recluse become a congregation? I asked the owner of the spinney about the matter.

'It's like that every year,' he said. 'The clump is overrun by Nightingales.'

'And the reason? '

'The reason is that there is a hive close by, behind that wall.'

I looked at the man in amazement, unable to understand what connection there could be between a hive and the thronging nightingales.

'Why, yes,' he added, 'there are a lot of nightingales because there are a lot of bees.

Another questioning look from my side. I did not yet understand.

The explanation came: 'The bees,' he said, 'throw out their dead grubs. The front of the hive is strewn with them in the mornings;and the nightingales come and collect them for themselves and their families. They are very fond of them.'

This time I had solved the puzzle. Delicious food, abundant and fresh each day, had brought the songsters together. Contrary to their habit, numbers of nightingales are living on friendly terms in a cluster of bushes, in order to be near the hive and to have a larger share in the morning distribution of plump dainties.

In the same way, the nightingale and his gastronomical rivals would haunt the neighborhood of the wasps' nests, if the dead grubs were cast out on the surface of the soil; but these delicacies fall inside the burrow and no little bird would dare to enter the murky cave, even if the entrance were not too small to admit it. Other consumers are needed here, small in size and great in daring; the fly is called for and her maggot, the king of the departed. What the greenbottles, the bluebottles and the flesh flies do in the open air, at the expense of every kind of corpse, other flies, narrowing their province, do underground at the Wasps' expense.

Let us turn our attention, in September, to the wrapper of a wasps' nest. On the outer surface and there alone, this wrapper is strewn with a multitude of big, white, elliptical dots, firmly fixed to the brown paper and measuring about two millimeters and a half long by one and a half wide. Flat below, convex above and of a lustrous white, these dots resemble very neat drops fallen from a tallow candle. Lastly, their backs are streaked with faint transversal lines, an elegant detail perceptible only with the lens. These curious objects are scattered all over the surface of the wrapper, sometimes at a distance from one another, sometimes gathered into more or less dense groups. They are the eggs of the Volucella, or bumblebee fly (Volucella zonaria, LIN.)Also stuck to the brown paper of the outer wrapper and mixed up with the Volucella's are a large number of other eggs, chalk white, spear-shaped and ridged lengthwise with seven or eight thin ribs, after the manner of the seeds of certain Umbelliferae. The finishing touch to their delicate beauty is the fine stippling all over the surface. They are smaller by half than the others. Ihave seen grubs come out of them which might easily be the earliest stage of some pointed maggots which I have already noticed in the burrows. My attempts to rear them failed; and I am not able to say which fly these eggs belong to. Enough for us to note the nameless one in passing. There are plenty of others, which we must make up our minds to leave unlabelled, in view of the jumbled crowd of feasters in the ruined wasps' nest. We will concern ourselves only with the most remarkable, in the front rank of which stands the bumblebee Fly.

She is a gorgeous and powerful fly; and her costume, with its brown and yellow bands, shows a vague resemblance to that of the wasps.