THE LANGUEDOCIAN SPHEX

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 LANGUEDOCIAN SPHEX

Chapter VIII. THE LANGUEDOCIAN SPHEX

When the chemist has fully prepared his plan of research, he mixes his reagent at the most convenient moment and lights a flame under his retort. He is the master of time, place and circumstances. He chooses his hour, shuts himself up in his laboratory, where nothing can come to disturb the business in hand; he produces at will this or that condition which reflection suggests to him: he is in quest of the secrets of inorganic matter, whose chemical activities science can awaken whenever it thinks fit.

The secrets of living matter—not those of anatomical structure, but really those of life in action, especially of instinct—present much more difficult and delicate conditions to the observer. Far from being able to choose his own time, he is the slave of the season, of the day, of the hour, of the very moment. When the opportunity offers, he must seize it as it comes, without hesitation, for it may be long before it presents itself again. And, as it usually arrives at the moment when he is least expecting it, nothing is in readiness for making the most of it. He must then and there improvise his little stock of experimenting material, contrive his plans, evolve his tactics, devise his tricks; and he can think himself lucky if inspiration comes fast enough to allow him to profit by the chance offered. This chance, moreover, hardly ever comes except to those who look for it. You must watch for it patiently for days and days, now on sandy slopes exposed to the full glare of the sun, now on some path walled in by high banks, where the heat is like that of an oven, or again on some sandstone ledge which is none too steady. If it is in your power to set up your observatory under a meagre olive-tree that pretends to protect you from the rays of a pitiless sun, you may bless the fate that treats you as a sybarite: your lot is an Eden. Above all, keep your eyes open. The spot is a good one; and—who knows?—the opportunity may come at any moment.

It came—late, it is true; but still it came. Ah, if you could now observe at your ease, in the quiet of your study, with nothing to distract your mind from your subject, far from the profane wayfarer who, seeing you so busily occupied at a spot where he sees nothing, will stop, overwhelm you with queries, take you for some water-diviner, or—a graver suspicion this—regard you as some questionable character searching for buried treasure and discovering by means of incantations where the old pots full of coin lie hidden! Should you still wear a Christian aspect in his eyes, he will approach you, look to see what you are looking at, and smile in a manner that leaves no doubt as to his poor opinion of people who spend their time in watching Flies. You will be lucky indeed if the troublesome visitor, with his tongue in his cheek, walks off at last without disturbing things and without repeating in his innocence the disaster brought about by my two conscripts’ boots.

Should your inexplicable doings not puzzle the passer-by, they will be sure to puzzle the village keeper, that uncompromising representative of the law in the ploughed acres. He has long had his eye on you. He has so often seen you wandering about, like a lost soul, for no appreciable reason; he has so often caught you rooting in the ground, or, with infinite precautions, knocking down some strip of wall in a sunken road, that in the end he has come to look upon you with dark suspicion. You are nothing to him but a gipsy, a tramp, a poultry-thief, a shady person or, at the best, a madman. Should you be carrying your botanizing-case, it will represent to him the poacher’s ferret-cage; and you would never get it out of his head that, regardless of the game-laws and the rights of landlords, you are clearing all the neighbouring warrens of their rabbits. Take care. However thirsty you may be, do not lay a finger on the nearest bunch of grapes: the man with the municipal badge will be there, delighted to have a case at last and so to receive an explanation of your highly perplexing behaviour.

I have never, I can safely say, committed any such misdemeanour; and yet, one day, lying on the sand, absorbed in the details of a Bembex’ household, I suddenly heard beside me:

‘In the name of the law, I arrest you! You come along with me!’

It was the keeper of Les Angles, who, after vainly waiting for an opportunity to catch me at fault and being daily more anxious for an answer to the riddle that was worrying him, at last resolved upon the brutal expedient of a summons. I had to explain things. The poor man seemed anything but convinced:

‘Pooh!’ he said. ‘Pooh! You will never make me believe that you come here and roast in the sun just to watch Flies. I shall keep an eye on you, mark you! And, the first time I …! However, that’ll do for the present.’

And he went off. I have always believed that my red ribbon had a good deal to do with his departure. And I also put down to that red ribbon certain other little services by which I benefited during my entomological and botanical excursions. It seemed to me—or was I dreaming?—it seemed to me that, on my botanizing expeditions up Mont Ventoux, the guide was more tractable and the donkey less obstinate.

The aforesaid bit of scarlet ribbon did not always spare me the tribulations which the entomologist must expect when experimenting on the public way. Here is a characteristic example. Ever since daybreak I have been ambushed, sitting on a stone, at the bottom of a ravine. The subject of my matutinal visit is the Languedocian Sphex. Three women, vine-pickers, pass in a group, on the way to their work. They give a glance at the man seated, apparently absorbed in reflection. At sunset, the same pickers pass again, carrying their full baskets on their heads. The man is still there, sitting on the same stone, with his eyes fixed on the same place. My motionless attitude, my long persistency in remaining at that deserted spot, must have impressed them deeply. As they passed by me, I saw one of them tap her forehead and heard her whisper to the others:

‘Un paouré inoucènt, pécaïre!’

And all three made the sign of the Cross.

An innocent, she had said, un inoucènt, an idiot, a poor creature, quite harmless, but half-witted; and they had all made the sign of the Cross, an idiot being to them one with God’s seal stamped upon him.

‘How now!’ thought I. ‘What a cruel mockery of fate! You, who are so laboriously seeking to discover what is instinct in the animal and what is reason, you yourself do not even possess your reason in these good women’s eyes! What a humiliating reflection!’

No matter: pécaïre, that expression of supreme compassion, in the Provençal dialect, pécaïre, coming from the bottom of the heart, soon made me forget inoucènt.

It is in this ravine with its three grape-gathering women that I would meet the reader, if he be not discouraged by the petty annoyances of which I have given him a foretaste. The Languedocian Sphex frequents these points, not in tribes congregating at the same spot when nest-building work begins, but as solitary individuals, sparsely distributed, settling wherever the chances of their vagabondage lead them. Even as her kinswoman, the Yellow-winged Sphex, seeks the society of her kind and the animation of a yard full of workers, the Languedocian Sphex prefers isolation, quiet and solitude. Graver of gait, more formal in her manners, of a larger size and also more sombrely clad, she always lives apart, not caring what others do, disdaining company, a genuine misanthrope among the Sphegidæ. The one is sociable, the other is not: a profound difference which in itself is enough to characterize them.

This amounts to saying that, with the Languedocian Sphex, the difficulties of observation increase. No long-meditated experiment is possible in her case; nor, when the first attempts have failed, can one hope to try them again, on the same occasion, with a second or a third subject and so on. If you prepare the materials for your observation in advance, if, for instance, you have in reserve a piece of game which you propose to substitute for that of the Sphex, it is to be feared, nay, it is almost certain that the huntress will not appear; and, when she does come at last, your materials are no longer fit for use and everything has to be improvised in a hurry, that very moment, under conditions that are not always satisfactory.

Let us take heart. The site is a first-rate one. Many a time already I have surprised the Sphex here, sunning herself on a vine-leaf. The insect, spread out flat, is basking voluptuously in the heat and light. From time to time it has a sort of frenzied outburst of pleasure: it quivers with content; it rapidly taps its feet on its couch, producing a tattoo not unlike that of rain falling heavily on the leaf. The joyous thrum can be heard several feet away. Then immobility begins again, soon followed by a fresh nervous commotion and by the whirling of the tarsi, a symbol of supreme felicity. I have known some of these passionate sun-lovers suddenly to leave the work-yard, when the larva’s cave has been half-dug, and go to the nearest vine to take a bath of heat and light, after which they would come back to the burrow, as though reluctantly, just to give a perfunctory sweep and soon end by knocking off work, unable to resist the exquisite temptation of luxuriating on the vine-leaves.

It may be that the voluptuous couch is also an observatory, whence the Wasp surveys the surrounding country in order to discover and select her prey. Her exclusive game is the Ephippiger of the Vine, scattered here and there on the branches or on any brambles hard by. The joint is a substantial one, especially as the Sphex favours solely the females, whose bellies are swollen with a mighty cluster of eggs.

Let us take no notice of the repeated trips, the fruitless searches, the tedium of frequent long waiting, but rather present the Sphex suddenly to the reader as she herself appears to the observer. Here she is, at the bottom of a sunken road with high, sandy banks. She comes on foot, but gets help from her wings in dragging her heavy prize. The Ephippiger’s antennæ, long and slender as threads, are the harnessing-ropes. Holding her head high, she grasps one of them in her mandibles. The antenna gripped passes between her legs; and the game follows, turned over on its back. Should the soil be too uneven and so offer resistance to this method of carting, the Wasp clasps her unwieldy burden and carries it with very short flights, interspersed, as often as possible, with journeys on foot. We never see her undertake a sustained flight, for long distances, holding the game in her legs, as is the practice of those expert aviators, the Bembeces and Cerceres, for instance, who bear through the air for more than half a mile their respective Flies or Weevils, a very light booty compared with the huge Ephippiger. The overpowering weight of her capture compels the Languedocian Sphex to make the whole, or nearly the whole, journey on foot, her method of transport being consequently slow and laborious.

The same reason, the bulk and weight of the prey, have entirely reversed the usual order which the Burrowing Wasps follow in their operations. This order we know: it consists in first digging a burrow and then stocking it with provisions. As the victim is not out of proportion to the strength of the spoiler, it is quite simple to carry it flying, which means that the Wasp can choose any site that she likes for her dwelling. She does not mind how far afield she goes for her prey: once she has captured her quarry, she comes flying home at a speed which makes questions of distance quite immaterial. Hence she prefers as the site for her burrow the place where she herself was born, the place where her forbears lived; she here inherits deep galleries, the accumulated work of earlier generations; and, by repairing them a little, she makes them serve as approaches to new chambers, which are in this way better protected than they would be if they depended upon the labours of a single Wasp, who had to start boring from the surface each year. This happens, for instance, in the case of the Great Cerceris and the Bee-eating Philanthus. And, should the ancestral abode not be strong enough to withstand the rough weather from one year to the next and to be handed down to the offspring, should the burrower have each time to start her tunnelling afresh, at least the Wasp finds greater safety in places consecrated by the experience of her forerunners. Consequently she goes there to dig her galleries, each of which serves as a corridor to a group of cells, thus effecting an economy in the aggregate labour expended upon the whole business of the laying.

In this way are formed not real societies, for there are no concerted efforts towards a common object, but at least assemblies where the sight of her kinswomen and her neighbours doubtless puts heart into the labour of the individual. We can observe, in fact, between these little tribes, springing from the same stock, and the burrowers who do their work alone, a difference in activity which reminds us of the emulation prevailing in a crowded yard and the indifference of labourers who have to work in solitude. Action is contagious in animals as in men; it is fired by its own example.

To sum up: when of a moderate weight for its captor, the prey can be conveyed flying, to a great distance. The Wasp can then choose any site that she pleases for her burrow. She adopts by preference the spot where she was born and uses each passage as a common corridor giving access to several cells. The result of this meeting at a common birthplace is the formation of groups, like turning to like, which is a source of friendly rivalry. This first step towards social life comes from facilities for travelling. Do not things happen in the same way with man, if I may be permitted the comparison? When he has nothing but trackless paths, man builds a solitary hut; when supplied with good roads, he and his fellows collect in populous cities; when served by railways which, so to speak, annihilate distance, they assemble in those immense human hives called London or Paris.

The situation of the Languedocian Sphex is just the reverse. Her prey is a heavy Ephippiger, a single dish representing by itself the sum total of provisions which the other freebooters amass on numerous journeys, insect by insect. What the Cerceres and the other plunderers strong on the wing accomplish by dividing the labour she does in a single journey. The weight of the prey makes any distant flight impossible; it has to be brought home slowly and laboriously, for it is a troublesome business to cart things along the ground. This alone makes the site of the burrow dependent on the accidents of the chase: the prey comes first and the dwelling next. So there is no assembling at a common meeting-place, no association of kindred spirits, no tribes stimulating one another in their work by mutual example, but isolation in the particular spot where the chances of the day have taken the Sphex, solitary labour, carried on without animation though with unfailing diligence. First of all, the prey is sought for, attacked, reduced to helplessness. Not until after that does the digger trouble about the burrow. A favourable place is chosen, as near as possible to the spot where the victim lies, so as to cut short the tedious work of transport; and the chamber of the future larva is rapidly hollowed out and at once receives the egg and the victuals. There you have an example of the inverted method of the Languedocian Sphex, a method, as all my observations go to prove, diametrically opposite to that of the other Hymenoptera. I will give some of the more striking of these observations.

When caught digging, the Languedocian Sphex is always alone, sometimes at the bottom of a dusty recess left by a stone that has dropped out of an old wall, sometimes ensconced in the shelter formed by a flat, projecting bit of sandstone, a shelter much sought after by the fierce Eyed Lizard to serve as an entrance-hall to his lair. The sun beats full upon it; it is an oven. The soil, consisting of old dust that has fallen little by little from the roof, is very easy to dig. The cell is soon scooped out with the mandibles, those pincers which are also used for digging, and the tarsi, which serve as rubbish-rakes. Then the miner flies off, but with a slow flight and no sudden display of wing-power, a manifest sign that the insect is not contemplating a distant expedition. We can easily follow it with our eyes and perceive the spot where it alights, usually ten or twelve yards away. At other times it decides to walk. It goes off and makes hurriedly for a spot where we will have the indiscretion to follow it, for our presence does not trouble it at all. On reaching its destination, either on foot or on the wing, it looks round for some time, as we gather from its undecided attitude and its journeys hither and thither. It looks round; at last it finds or rather retrieves something. The object recovered is an Ephippiger, half-paralysed, but still moving her tarsi, antennæ and ovipositor. She is a victim which the Sphex certainly stabbed not long ago with a few stings. After the operation the Wasp left her prey, an embarrassing burden amid the suspense of house-hunting; she abandoned it perhaps on the very spot where she captured it, contenting herself with making it more or less conspicuous by placing it on some grass-tuft, in order to find it more easily later; and, trusting to her good memory to return presently to the spot where the booty lies, she set out to explore the neighbourhood with the object of finding a suitable site and there digging a burrow. Once the home was ready, she came back to her prize, which she found again without much hesitation, and she now prepares to lug it home. She bestrides the victim, seizes one or both of the antennæ, and off she goes, tugging and dragging with all the strength of her loins and jaws.

Sometimes she has only to make one journey; at other times and more often, the carter suddenly plumps down her load and quickly runs home. Perhaps it occurs to her that the entrance-door is not wide enough to admit so substantial a morsel; perhaps she remembers some lack of finish that might hamper the storing. And, in point of fact, the worker does touch up her work: she enlarges the doorway, smooths the threshold, strengthens the ceiling. It is all done with a few strokes of the tarsi. Then she returns to the Ephippiger, lying yonder, on her back, a few steps away. The hauling begins again. On the road, the Sphex seems struck with a new idea, which flashes through her quick brain. She has inspected the door, but has not looked inside. Who knows if all is well in there? She hastens to see, dropping the Ephippiger before she goes. The interior is inspected; and apparently a few pats of the trowel are administered with the tarsi, giving a last polish to the walls. Without lingering too long over these delicate after-touches, the Wasp goes back to her booty and harnesses herself to its antennæ. Forward! Will the journey be completed this time? I would not answer for it. I have known a Sphex, more suspicious than the others, perhaps, or more neglectful of the minor architectural details, to repair her omissions, to dispel her doubts, by abandoning her prize on the way five or six times running, in order to hurry to the burrow, which each time was touched up a little or merely inspected within. It is true that others make straight for their destination, without even stopping to rest. I must also add that, when the Wasp goes home to improve the dwelling, she does not fail to give a glance from a distance every now and then at the Ephippiger over there, to make sure that nothing has happened to her. This solicitude recalls that of the Sacred Beetle when he leaves the hall which he is excavating in order to come and feel his beloved pellet and bring it a little nearer to him.

The inference to be drawn from the details which I have related is manifest. The fact that every Languedocian Sphex surprised in her mining operations, even though it be at the very beginning of the digging, at the first stroke of the tarsus in the dust, afterwards, when the home is prepared, makes a short excursion, now on foot, anon flying, and invariably finds herself in possession of a victim already stabbed, already paralysed, compels us to conclude, in all certainty, that this Wasp does her work as a huntress first and as a burrower after, so that the place of the capture decides the place of the home.

This reversal of procedure, which causes the food to be prepared before the larder, whereas hitherto we have seen the larder come before the food, I attribute to the weight of the Sphex’ prey, a prey which it is not possible to carry far through the air. It is not that the Languedocian Sphex is ill-built for flight: on the contrary, she can soar magnificently; but the prey which she hunts would weigh her down if she had no other support than her wings. She needs the support of the ground for her hauling-work, in which she displays wonderful strength. When laden with her prey, she always goes afoot, or takes but very short flights, even under conditions when flight would save her time and trouble. I will quote an instance taken from my latest observations on this curious Wasp.

A Sphex appears unexpectedly, coming I know not whence. She is on foot, dragging her Ephippiger, a capture which apparently she has made that moment in the neighbourhood. In the circumstances it behoves her to dig herself a burrow. The site is as bad as bad can be. It is a well-beaten path, hard as stone. The Sphex, who has no time to make laborious excavations, because the already captured prize must be stored as quickly as possible, the Sphex wants soft ground, wherein the larva’s chamber can be contrived in one short spell of work. I have described her favourite soil, namely, the dust of years which has accumulated at the bottom of some hole in a wall or of some little shelter under the rocks. Well, the Sphex whom I am now observing stops at the foot of a house with a newly-whitewashed front some twenty to twenty-five feet high. Her instinct tells her that up there, under the red tiles of the roof, she will find nooks rich in old dust. She leaves her prey at the foot of the house and flies up to the roof. For some time I see her looking here, there, and everywhere. After finding a proper site, she begins to work under the curve of a pantile. In ten minutes, or fifteen at most, the home is ready. The insect now flies down again. The Ephippiger is promptly found. She has to be taken up. Will this be done on the wing, as circumstances seem to demand? Not at all. The Sphex adopts the toilsome method of scaling a perpendicular wall, with a surface smoothed by the mason’s trowel and measuring twenty to twenty-five feet in height. Seeing her take this road, dragging the game between her legs, I at first think the feat impossible; but I am soon reassured as to the outcome of the bold attempt. Getting a foothold on the little roughnesses in the mortar, the plucky insect, despite the hindrance of her heavy load, walks up this vertical plane with the same assured gait and the same speed as on level ground. The top is reached without the least accident; and the prey is laid temporarily on the edge of the roof, upon the rounded back of a tile. While the digger gives a finishing touch to the burrow, the badly-balanced prey slips and drops to the foot of the wall. The thing must be done all over again and once more by laboriously climbing the height. The same mistake is repeated. Again the prey is incautiously left on the curved tile, again it slips and again it falls to the ground. With a composure which accidents such as these cannot disturb, the Sphex for the third time hoists up the Ephippiger by scaling the wall and, better advised, drags her forthwith right into the home.

As even under these conditions no attempt has been made to carry the prey on the wing, it is clear that the Wasp is incapable of long flight with so heavy a load. To this incapacity we owe the few characteristics that form the subject of this chapter. A quarry that is not too big to permit the effort of flying makes of the Yellow-winged Sphex a semisocial species, that is to say, one seeking the company of her fellows; a quarry too heavy to carry through the air makes of the Languedocian Sphex a species vowed to solitary labour, a sort of savage disdainful of the pleasures that come from the proximity of one’s kind. The lighter or heavier weight of the game selected here determines the fundamental character of the huntress.

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