THE WISDOM OF INSTINCT

The Hunting Wasps by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE WISDOM OF INSTINCT Chapter IX. THE WISDOM OF INSTINCT To paralyse her prey, the Languedocian Sphex, I have no doubt, pursues the method of the Cricket-huntress and drives her lancet repeatedly into the Ephippiger’s breast in order to strike the ganglia of the thorax. The process of wounding the nerve-centres must be familiar to her; and I am convinced beforehand of her consummate skill in that scientific operation. This is an art thoroughly known to all the Hunting Wasps, who carry a poisoned dart that has not been given them in vain. At the same time, I must confess that I have never yet succeeded in witnessing the deadly performance. This omission is due to the solitary life led by the Languedocian Sphex. When a number of burrows are dug on a common site and then provisioned, one has but to wait on the spot to see now one huntress and now another arrive with the game which they have caught. It is easy in these circumstances to try upon the new arrivals the substitution of a live prey for the doomed victim and to repeat the experiment as often as we wish. Besides, the certainty that we shall not lack subjects of observation, as and when wanted, enables us to arrange everything in advance. With the Languedocian Sphex these conditions of success do not exist. To set out expressly to look for her, with one’s material prepared, is almost useless, as the solitary insect is scattered one by one over vast expanses of ground. Moreover, if you do come upon her, it will most often be in an idle hour and you will get nothing out of her. As I said before, it is nearly always unexpectedly, when your thoughts are elsewhere engaged, that the Sphex appears, dragging her Ephippiger after her. This is the moment, the only propitious moment, to attempt a substitution of prey and invite the huntress to let you witness her lancet-thrusts. Quick, let us procure an alternative morsel, a live Ephippiger! Hurry, time presses: in a few minutes the burrow will have received the victuals and the glorious occasion will be lost! Must I speak of my mortification at these moments of good fortune, the mocking bait held out by chance? Here, before my eyes, is matter for interesting observations; and I cannot profit by it! I cannot surprise the Sphex’ secret for the lack of something to offer her in the place of her prize! Try it for yourself, try setting out in quest of an alternative piece with only a few minutes at your disposal, when it took me three days of wild running about before I found Weevils for my Cerceres! And yet I made the desperate experiment twice over. Ah, if the keeper had caught me this time, tearing like mad through the vineyards, what a good opportunity it would have been for crediting me with robbery and having me up before the magistrate! Vine-branches and clusters of grapes: not a thing did I respect in my mad rush, hampered by the trailing shoots. I must have an Ephippiger at all costs, I must have him that moment. And once I did get my Ephippiger during one of these frenzied expeditions. I was radiant with joy, never suspecting the bitter disappointment in store for me. If only I arrive in time, if only the Sphex be still engaged in transport work! Thank heaven, everything is in my favour! The Wasp is still some distance away from her burrow and still dragging her prize along. With my forceps I pull gently at it from behind. The huntress resists, stubbornly clutches the antennæ of her victim and refuses to let go. I pull harder, even drawing the carter back as well; it makes no difference: the Sphex does not loose her hold. I have with me a pair of sharp scissors, belonging to my little entomological case. I use them and promptly cut the harness-ropes, the Ephippiger’s long antennæ. The Sphex continues to move ahead, but soon stops, astonished at the sudden decrease in the weight of the burden which she is trailing, for this burden is now reduced merely to the two antennæ, snipped off by my mischievous wiles. The real load, the heavy, pot-bellied insect, remains behind and is instantly replaced by my live specimen. The Wasp turns round, lets go the ropes that now draw nothing after them, and retraces her steps. She comes face to face with the prey substituted for her own. She examines it, walks round it gingerly, then stops, moistens her foot with saliva, and begins to wash her eyes. In this attitude of meditation, can some such thought as the following pass through her mind: ‘Come now! Am I awake or am I asleep? Do I know what I am about or do I not? That thing’s not mine. Who or what is trying to humbug me?’ At any rate, the Sphex shows no great hurry to attack my prey with her mandibles. She keeps away from it and shows not the smallest wish to seize it. To excite her, I offer the insect to her in my fingers, I almost thrust the antennæ under her teeth. I know that she does not suffer from shyness; I know that she will come and take from your fingers, without hesitation, the prey which you have snatched from her and afterwards present to her. But what is this? Scorning my offers, the Sphex retreats instead of snapping up what I place within her reach. I put down the Ephippiger, who, obeying a thoughtless impulse, unconscious of danger, goes straight to his assassin. Now we shall see! Alas, no: the Sphex continues to recoil, like a regular coward, and ends by flying away. I never saw her again. Thus ended, to my confusion, an experiment that had filled me with such enthusiasm. Later and by degrees, as I inspected an increasing number of burrows, I came to understand my failure and the obstinate refusal of the Sphex. I always found the provisions to consist, without a single exception, of a female Ephippiger, harbouring in her belly a copious and succulent cluster of eggs. This appears to be the favourite food of the grubs. Well, in my hurried rush through the vines, I had laid my hands on an Ephippiger of the other sex. I was offering the Sphex a male. More far-seeing than I in this important question of provender, the Wasp would have nothing to say to my game: ‘A male, indeed! Is that a dinner for my larvæ? What do you take them for?’ What nice discrimination they have, these dainty epicures, who are able to differentiate between the tender flesh of the female and the comparatively dry flesh of the males! What an unerring glance, which can distinguish at once between the two sexes, so much alike in shape and colour! The female carries a sword at the tip of her abdomen, the ovipositor wherewith the eggs are buried in the ground; and that is about the only external difference between her and the male. This distinguishing feature never escapes the perspicacious Sphex; and that is why, in my experiment, the Wasp rubbed her eyes, hugely puzzled at beholding swordless a prey which she well knew carried a sword when she caught it. What must not have passed through her little Sphex brain at the sight of this transformation? Let us now watch the Wasp when, having prepared the burrow, she goes back for her victim, which, after its capture and the operation that paralysed it, she has left at no great distance. The Ephippiger is in a condition similar to that of the Cricket sacrificed by the Yellow-winged Sphex, a condition proving for certain that stings have been driven into her thoracic ganglia. Nevertheless, a good many movements still continue; but they are disconnected, though endowed with a certain vigour. Incapable of standing on its legs, the insect lies on its side or on its back. It flutters its long antennæ and also its palpi; it opens and closes its mandibles and bites as hard as in the normal state. The abdomen heaves rapidly and deeply. The ovipositor is brought back sharply under the belly, against which it almost lies flat. The legs stir, but languidly and irregularly; the middle legs seem more torpid than the others. If pricked with a needle, the whole body shudders convulsively; efforts are made to get up and walk, but without success. In short, the insect would be full of life, but for its inability to move about or even to stand upon its legs. We have here therefore a wholly local paralysis, a paralysis of the legs, or rather a partial abolition and ataxy of their movements. Can this very incomplete inertia be caused by some special arrangement of the victim’s nervous system, or does it come from this, that the Wasp perhaps administers only a single prick, instead of stinging each ganglion of the thorax, as the Cricket-huntress does? I cannot tell. Still, for all its shivering, its convulsions, its disconnected movements, the victim is none the less incapable of hurting the larva that is meant to devour it. I have taken from the burrow of the Sphex Ephippigers struggling just as lustily as when they were first half-paralysed; and nevertheless the feeble grub, hatched but a few hours since, was digging its teeth into the gigantic victim in all security; the dwarf was biting into the colossus without danger to itself. This striking result is due to the spot selected by the mother for laying her egg. I have already said how the Yellow-winged Sphex glues her egg to the Cricket’s breast, a little to one side, between the first and second pair of legs. Exactly the same place is chosen by the White-edged Sphex; and a similar place, a little farther back, towards the root of one of the large hind-thighs, is adopted by the Languedocian Sphex, all three thus giving proof, by this uniformity, of wonderful discernment in picking out the spot where the egg is bound to be safe. Consider the Ephippiger pent in the burrow. She lies stretched upon her back, absolutely incapable of turning. In vain she struggles, in vain she writhes: the disordered movements of her legs are lost in space, the room being too wide to afford them the support of its walls. The grub cares nothing for the victim’s convulsions: it is at a spot where naught can reach it, not tarsi, nor mandibles, nor ovipositor, nor antennæ; a spot absolutely stationary, devoid of so much as a surface tremor. It is in perfect safety, on the sole condition that the Ephippiger cannot shift her position, turn over, get upon her feet; and this one condition is admirably fulfilled. But, with several heads of game, all in the same stage of paralysis, the larva’s danger would be great. Though it would have nothing to fear from the insect first attacked, because of its position out of the reach of its victim, it would have every occasion to dread the proximity of the others, which, stretching their legs at random, might strike it and rip it open with their spurs. This is perhaps the reason why the Yellow-winged Sphex, who heaps up three or four Crickets in the same cell, practically annihilates all movement in its victims, whereas the Languedocian Sphex, victualling each burrow with a single piece of game, leaves her Ephippigers the best part of their power of motion and contents herself with making it impossible for them to change their position or stand upon their legs. She may thus, though I cannot say so positively, economize her dagger-thrusts. While the only half-paralysed Ephippiger cannot imperil the larva, fixed on a part of the body where resistance is impossible, the case is different with the Sphex, who has to cart her prize home. First, having still, to a great extent, preserved the use of its tarsi, the victim clutches with these at any blade of grass encountered on the road along which it is being dragged; and this produces an obstacle to the hauling process which is difficult to overcome. The Sphex, already heavily burdened by the weight of her load, is liable to exhaust herself with her efforts to make the other insect relax its desperate grip in grassy places. But this is the least serious drawback. The Ephippiger preserves the complete use of her mandibles, which snap and bite with their customary vigour. Now what these terrible nippers have in front of them is just the slender body of the enemy, at a time when she is in her hauling attitude. The antennæ, in fact, are grasped not far from their roots, so that the mouth of the victim dragged along on its back faces either the thorax or the abdomen of the Sphex, who, standing high on her long legs, takes good care, I am convinced, not to be caught in the mandibles yawning underneath her. At all events, a moment of forgetfulness, a slip, the merest trifle can bring her within the reach of two powerful nippers, which would not neglect the opportunity of taking a pitiless vengeance. In the more difficult cases at any rate, if not always, the action of those formidable pincers must be done away with; and the fish-hooks of the legs must be rendered incapable of increasing their resistance to the process of transport. How will the Sphex go to work to obtain this result? Here man, even the man of science, would hesitate, would waste his time in barren efforts and would perhaps abandon all hope of success. He can come and take one lesson from the Sphex. She, without ever being taught it, without ever seeing it practised by others, understands her surgery through and through. She knows the most delicate mysteries of the physiology of the nerves, or rather she behaves as if she did. She knows that under her victim’s skull there is a circlet of nervous nuclei, something similar to the brain of the higher animals. She knows that this main centre of innervation controls the action of the mouth-parts and moreover is the seat of the will, without whose orders not a single muscle acts; lastly, she knows that, by injuring this sort of brain, she will cause all resistance to cease, the insect no longer possessing any will to resist. As for the mode of operating, this is the easiest matter in the world to her; and, when we have been taught in her school, we are free to try her process in our turn. The instrument employed is no longer the sting: the insect, in its wisdom, has deemed compression preferable to a poisoned thrust. Let us accept its decision, for we shall see presently how prudent it is to be convinced of our own ignorance in the presence of the animal’s knowledge. Lest by editing my account I should fail to give a true impression of the sublime talent of this masterly operator, I here copy out my note as I pencilled it on the spot, immediately after the stirring spectacle. The Sphex finds that her victim is offering too much resistance, hooking itself here and there to blades of grass. She then stops to perform upon it the following curious operation, a sort of coup de grâce. The Wasp, still astride her prey, forces open the articulation of the neck, high up, at the nape. Then she seizes the neck with her mandibles and, without making any external wound, probes as far forward as possible under the skull, so as to seize and chew up the ganglia of the head. When this operation is done, the victim is utterly motionless, incapable of the least resistance, whereas previously the legs, though deprived of the power of connected movement needed for walking, vigorously opposed the process of traction. There is the fact in all its eloquence. With the points of its mandibles, the insect, while leaving uninjured the thin and supple membrane of the neck, goes rummaging into the skull and munching the brain. There is no effusion of blood, no wound, but simply an external pressure. Of course, I kept for my own purposes the Ephippiger paralysed before my eyes, in order to ascertain the effects of the operation at my leisure; also, of course, I hastened to repeat in my turn, upon live Ephippigers, what the Sphex had just taught me. I will here compare my results with the Wasp’s. Two Ephippigers whose cervical ganglia I squeeze and compress with a forceps fall rapidly into a state resembling that of the victims of the Sphex. Only, they grate their cymbals if I tease them with a needle; and the legs still retain a few disordered and languid movements. The difference no doubt is due to the fact that my patients were not previously injured in their thoracic ganglia, as were those of the Sphex, who were first stung on the breast. Allowing for this important condition, we see that I was none too bad a pupil and that I imitated pretty closely my teacher of physiology, the Sphex. I confess it was not without a certain satisfaction that I succeeded in doing almost as well as the insect. As well? What am I talking about? Wait a bit and you shall see that I still have much to learn from the Sphex. For what happens is that my two patients very soon die: I mean, they really die; and, in four or five days, I have nothing but putrid corpses before my eyes. And the Wasp’s Ephippiger? I need hardly say that the Wasp’s Ephippiger, even ten days after the operation, is perfectly fresh, just as she will be required by the larva for which she has been destined. Nay, more: only a few hours after the operation under the skull, there reappeared, as though nothing had occurred, the disorderly movements of the legs, antennæ, palpi, ovipositor and mandibles; in a word, the insect returned to the condition wherein it was before the Sphex bit its brain. And these movements were kept up after, though they became feebler every day. The Sphex had merely reduced her victim to a passing state of torpor, lasting amply long enough to enable her to bring it home without resistance; and I, who thought myself her rival, was but a clumsy and barbarous butcher: I killed my prize. She, with her inimitable dexterity, shrewdly compressed the brain to produce a lethargy of a few hours; I, brutal through ignorance, perhaps crushed under my forceps that delicate organ, the main seat of life. If anything could prevent me from blushing at my defeat, it would be the conviction that very few, if any, could vie with these clever ones in cleverness. Ah, I now understand why the Sphex does not use her sting to injure the cervical ganglia! A drop of poison injected here, at the centre of vital force, would destroy the whole nervous system; and death would follow soon after. But it is not death that the huntress wishes to obtain; the larvæ have not the least use for dead game, for a corpse, in short, smelling of corruption; and all that she wants to bring about is a lethargy, a passing torpor, which will put a stop to the victim’s resistance during the carting process, this resistance being difficult to overcome and moreover dangerous for the Sphex. The torpor is obtained by a method known in laboratories of experimental physiology: compression of the brain. The Sphex acts like a Flourens, who, laying bare an animal’s brain and bearing upon the cerebral mass, forthwith suppresses intelligence, will, sensibility and movement. The pressure is removed; and everything reappears. Even so do the remains of the Ephippiger’s life reappear, as the lethargic effects of a skilfully-directed pressure pass off. The ganglia of the skull, squeezed between the mandibles but without fatal contusions, gradually recover their activity and put an end to the general torpor. Admit that it is all alarmingly scientific. 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fortune has her entomological whims: you run after her and catch no glimpse of her; you forget about her and behold, she comes tapping at your door! How vainly I watched and waited, how many useless journeys I made to see the Languedocian Sphex sacrifice her Ephippigers! Twenty years pass; these pages are in the printer’s hands; and, one day early this month, on the 8th of August 1878, my son Emile comes rushing into my study: ‘Quick!’ he shouts. ‘Come quick: there’s a Sphex dragging her prey under the plane-trees, outside the door of the yard!’ Emile knew all about the business, from what I had told him, to amuse him when we used to sit up late, and better still from similar incidents which he had witnessed in our life out of doors. He is right. I run out and see a magnificent Languedocian Sphex dragging a paralysed Ephippiger by the antennæ. She is making for the hen-house close by and seems anxious to scale the wall, with the object of fixing her burrow under some tile on the roof; for, a few years ago, in the same place, I saw a Sphex of the same species accomplish the ascent with her game and make her home under the arch of a badly-joined tile. Perhaps the present Wasp is descended from the one who performed that arduous climb. A like feat seems about to be repeated; and this time before numerous witnesses, for all the family, working under the shade of the plane-trees, come and form a circle around the Sphex. They wonder at the unceremonious boldness of the insect, which is not diverted from its work by a gallery of onlookers; all are struck by its proud and lusty bearing, as, with raised head and the victim’s antennæ firmly gripped in its mandibles, it drags the enormous burden after it. I, alone among the spectators, feel a twinge of regret at the sight: ‘Ah, if only I had some live Ephippigers!’ I cannot help saying, with not the least hope of seeing my wish realized. ‘Live Ephippigers?’ replies Émile. ‘Why, I have some perfectly fresh ones, caught this morning!’ He dashes upstairs, four steps at a time, and runs to his little den, where a fence of dictionaries encloses a park for the rearing of some fine caterpillars of the Spurge Hawk-moth. He brings me three Ephippigers, the best that I could wish for, two females and a male. How did these insects come to be at hand, at the moment when they were wanted, for an experiment tried in vain twenty years ago? That is another story. A Lesser Grey Shrike had nested in one of the tall plane-trees of the avenue. Now a few days earlier, the mistral, the brutal north-west wind of our parts, blew with such violence as to bend the branches as well as the reeds; and the nest, turned upside down by the swaying of its support, had dropped its contents, four small birds. Next morning I found the brood upon the ground; three were killed by the fall, the fourth was still alive. The survivor was entrusted to the cares of Émile, who went Cricket-hunting twice a day on the neighbouring grass-plots for the benefit of his young charge. But Crickets are small and the nurseling’s appetite called for many of them. Another dish was preferred, the Ephippiger, of whom a stock was collected from time to time among the stalks and prickly leaves of the eryngo. The three insects which Émile brought me came from the Shrike’s larder. My pity for the fallen nestling had procured me this unhoped-for success. After making the circle of spectators stand back so as to leave the field clear for the Sphex, I take away her prey with a pair of pincers and at once give her in exchange one of my Ephippigers, carrying a sword at the end of her belly, like the game which I have abstracted. The dispossessed Wasp stamps her feet two or three times; and that is the only sign of impatience which she gives. She goes for her new prey, which is too stout, too obese even to try to avoid pursuit, grips it with her mandibles by the saddle-shaped corselet, gets astride and, curving her abdomen, slips the end of it under the Ephippiger’s thorax. Here, no doubt, some stings are administered, though I am unable to state the number exactly, because of the difficulty of observation. The Ephippiger, a peaceable victim, suffers herself to be operated on without resistance; she is like the silly Sheep of our slaughter-houses. The Sphex takes her time and wields her lancet with a deliberation which favours accuracy of aim. So far, the observer has nothing to complain of; but the prey touches the ground with its breast and belly, and exactly what happens underneath escapes his eye. As for interfering and lifting the Ephippiger a little, so as to see better, that must not be thought of: the murderess would resheathe her weapon and retire. The act that follows is easy to observe. After stabbing the thorax, the tip of the abdomen appears under the victim’s neck, which the operator forces open by pressing the nape. At this point the sting probes with marked persistency, as if the prick administered here were more effective than elsewhere. One would be inclined to think that the nerve-centre attacked is the lower part of the œsophageal chain; but the continuance of movement in the mouth-parts—the mandibles, jaws and palpi—controlled by this seat of innervation shows that such is not the case. Through the neck the Sphex reaches simply the ganglia of the thorax, or at any rate the first of them, which is more easily accessible through the thin skin of the neck than through the integuments of the chest. And in a moment it is all over. Without the least shiver denoting pain, the Ephippiger becomes henceforth an inert mass. I remove the Sphex’ patient for the second time and replace it by the other female at my disposal. The same proceedings are repeated, followed by the same result. The Sphex has performed her skilful surgery thrice over, almost in immediate succession, first with her own prey and then with my substitutes. Will she do so a fourth time with the male Ephippiger whom I still have left? I have my doubts, not because the Wasp is tired, but because the game does not suit her. I have never seen her with any prey but females, who, crammed with eggs, are the food which the larvæ appreciate above all others. My suspicion is well founded; deprived of her capture, the Sphex stubbornly refuses the male whom I offer to her. She runs hither and thither, with hurried steps, in search of the vanished game; three or four times she goes up to the Ephippiger, walks round him, casts a scornful glance at him; and at last she flies away. He is not what her larvæ want; experiment demonstrates this once again after an interval of twenty years. The three females stabbed, two of them before my eyes, remain in my possession. In each case all the legs are completely paralysed. Whether lying naturally, on its belly or on its back or side, the insect retains indefinitely whatever position we give it. A continued fluttering of the antennæ, a few intermittent pulsations of the belly, and the play of the mouth-parts are the only signs of life. Movement is destroyed but not susceptibility; for, at the least prick administered to a thin-skinned spot, the whole body gives a slight shudder. Perhaps, some day, physiology will find in such victims the material for valuable work on the functions of the nervous system. The Wasp’s sting, so incomparably skilful at striking a particular point and administering a wound which affects that point alone, will supplement, with immense advantage, the experimenter’s brutal scalpel, which rips open where it ought to give merely a light touch. Meanwhile, here are the results which I have obtained from the three victims, but in another direction. As only the movement of the legs has been destroyed, without any wound save that of the nerve-centres, which are the seat of that movement, the insect must die of inanition and not of its injuries. The experiment was conducted as follows: two sound and healthy Ephippigers, just as I picked them up in the fields, were imprisoned without food, one in the dark, the other in the light. The second died in four days, the first in five. This difference of a day is easily explained. In the light, the insect made greater exertions to recover its liberty; and, as every movement of the animal machine is accompanied by a corresponding expenditure of energy, a greater sum total of activity has involved a more rapid consumption of the reserve force of the organism. In the light, there is more restlessness and a shorter life; in the dark, less restlessness and a longer life, while no food at all was taken in either case. One of my three stabbed Ephippigers was kept in the dark, fasting. In her case there were not only the conditions of complete abstinence and darkness, but also the serious wounds inflicted by the Sphex; and nevertheless for seventeen days I saw her continually waving her antennæ. As long as this sort of pendulum keeps on swinging, the clock of life does not stop. On the eighteenth day the creature ceased its antennary movements and died. The badly-wounded insect therefore lived, under the same conditions, four times as long as the insect that was untouched. What seemed as though it should be a cause of death was really a cause of life. However paradoxical it may seem at first sight, this result is exceedingly simple. When untouched, the insect exerts itself and consequently uses up its reserves. When paralysed, it has merely the feeble, internal movements which are inseparable from any organism; and its substance is economized in proportion to the weakness of the action displayed. In the first case, the animal machine is at work and wears itself out; in the second, it is at rest and saves itself. There being no nourishment now to repair the waste, the moving insect spends its nutritive reserves in four days and dies; the motionless insect does not spend them and lives for eighteen days. Life is a continual dissolution, the physiologists tell us; and the Sphex’ victims give us the neatest possible demonstration of the fact. One remark more. Fresh food is absolutely necessary for the Wasp’s larvæ. If the prey were warehoused in the burrow intact, in four or five days it would be a corpse abandoned to corruption; and the scarce-hatched grub would find nothing to live upon but a putrid mass. Pricked with the sting, however, it can keep alive for two or three weeks, a period more than long enough to allow the egg to hatch and the larva to grow. The paralysing of the victim therefore has a twofold result: first, the living dish remains motionless and the safety of the delicate grub is not endangered; secondly, the meat keeps good a long time and thus ensures wholesome food for the larva. Man’s logic, enlightened by science, could discover nothing better. My two other Ephippigers stung by the Sphex were kept in the dark with food. To feed inert insects, hardly differing from corpses except by the perpetual waving of their long antennæ, seems at first an impossibility; still, the play of the mouth-parts gave me some hope and I tried. My success exceeded my anticipations. There was no question here, of course, of giving them a lettuce-leaf or any other piece of green stuff on which they might have browsed in their normal state; they were feeble valetudinarians, who needed spoon-feeding, so to speak, and supporting with liquid nourishment. I used sugar-and-water. Laying the insect on its back, I place a drop of the sugary fluid on its mouth with a straw. The palpi at once begin to stir; the mandibles and jaws move. The drop is swallowed with evident satisfaction, especially after a somewhat prolonged fast. I repeat the dose until it is refused. The meal takes place once a day, sometimes twice, at irregular intervals, lest I should become too much of a slave to my patients. Well, one of the Ephippigers lived for twenty-one days on this meagre fare. It was not much, compared with the eighteen days of the one whom I had left to die of starvation. True, the insect had twice had a bad fall, having dropped from the experimenting-table to the floor owing to some piece of awkwardness on my part. The bruises which it received must have hastened its end. The other, which suffered no accidents, lived for forty days. As the nourishment employed, sugar-and-water, could not indefinitely take the place of the natural green food, it is very likely that the insect would have lived longer still if the usual diet had been possible. And so the point which I had in view is proved: the victims stung by the Digger-wasps die of starvation and not of their wounds. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2022). The Hunting Wasps. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67110/pg67110-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .