The
animalcule explores its dish, now here, now elsewhere; it runs all over
it with looper strides; it pries into the neighborhood by lifting and
shaking its head.

I see a need for this long wait under a transitory form that requires
no feeding. The egg is laid by the mother on the surface of the nest,
somewhere near a suitable cell, I dare say, but still at a distance from
the fostering larva, which is protected by a thick rampart. It is for
the new born grub to make its own way to the provisions, not by violence
and house breaking, of which it is incapable, but by patiently slipping
through a maze of cracks, first tried, then abandoned, then tried again.
It is a very difficult task, even for this most slender worm, for the
bee's masonry is exceedingly compact. There are no chinks due to bad
building; no fissures due to the weather; nothing but an apparently
impenetrable homogeneity. I see but one weak part and that only in a few
nests: it is the line where the dome joins the surface of the stone. An
imperfect soldering between two materials of different nature, cement
and flint, may leave a breach wide enough to admit besiegers as thin as
a hair. Nevertheless, the lens is far from always finding an inlet of
this kind on the nests occupied by Anthrax flies.

And so I am ready to allow that the animalcule wandering in search of
its cell has the whole area of the dome at its disposal when selecting
an entrance. Where the line auger of the Leucospis can enter, is there
not room enough for the even slimmer Anthrax grub? True, the Leucospis
possesses muscular force and a hard boring tool. The Anthrax is
extremely weak and has nothing but invincible patience. It does at
great length of time what the other, furnished with superior implements,
accomplishes in three hours. This explains the fortnight spent by the
Anthrax under the initial form, the object of which is to overcome
the obstacle of the mason's wall, to pierce through the texture of the
cocoon and to reach the victuals.

I even believe that it takes longer. The work is so laborious and
the worker so feeble! I cannot tell how long it is since my bantlings
attained their object. Perhaps, aided by easy roads, they had reached
their fostering larvae long before the completion of their first
babyhood, the end of which they were spending before my eyes, with no
apparent purpose, in exploring their provisions. The time had not yet
come for them to change their skins a