Sphex. (For the author's
experiments with the Languedocian, the Yellow-winged and the White-edged
Sphex, cf. "The Hunting Wasps": chapter 11.--Translator's Note.) While
the Tachytes is underground, I move the game away. The insect comes up
again and sees nothing at its door; it comes out and goes to fetch its
Locust, whom it places in position as before. This done, it goes in
again by itself. In its absence I once more pull back the prey. Fresh
emergence of the Wasp, who puts things to rights and persists in going
down again, still by herself, however often I repeat the experiment.
Yet it would be very easy for her to put an end to my teasing: she would
only have to descend straightway with her game, instead of leaving it
for a moment on her doorstep. But, faithful to the usages of her race,
she behaves as her ancestors behaved before her, even though the ancient
custom happen to be unprofitable. Like the Yellow-winged Sphex, whom I
have teased so often during her cellaring-operations, she is a narrow
conservative, learning nothing and forgetting nothing.

Let us leave her to do her work in peace. The Locust disappears
underground and the egg is laid upon the breast of the paralysed insect.
That is all: one carcase for each cell, no more. The entrance is stopped
at last, first with stones, which will prevent the trickling of the
embankment into the chamber; next with sweepings of dust, under which
every vestige of the subterranean house disappears. It is now done:
the Tachytes will come here no more. Other burrows will occupy her,
distributed at the whim of her vagabond humour.

A cell provisioned before my eyes on the 22nd of August, in one of the
walls in the harmas, contained the finished cocoon a week later. (The
harmas was the piece of enclosed waste land in which the author used to
study his insects in their natural state. Cf. "The Life of the Fly,"
by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapter
1.--Translator's Note.) I have not noted many examples of so rapid a
development. This cocoon recalls, in its shape and texture, that of the
Bembex-wasps. It is hard and mineralized, this is to say, the warp and
woof of silk are hidden by a thick encrustation of sand. This composite
structure seems to me characteristic of the family; at all events I find
it in the three species whose cocoons I know. If the Tachytes are nearly
related to the Spheges in diet, they are far removed from them in the
ind