nd 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. I have 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. Our
fashionable theorists have availed themselves of this brown and yellow
to cite the Volucella as a striking instance of protective mimicry.
Obliged, if not on her own behalf, at least on that