A FIGHT WITH A CARPENTER-BEE
Instead of with the Bumble-bee, who enters the Spider’s burrow, I wish to make the Tarantula fight with some other insect, who will stay above ground. For this purpose I take one of the largest and most powerful Bees that I can find, the Carpenter-bee, clad in black velvet, with wings of purple gauze. She is nearly an inch long; her sting is very painful and produces a swelling that hurts for a long time. I know, because I have been stung. Here indeed is a foe worthy of the Tarantula.
I catch several Carpenter-bees, place them one by one in bottles, and choose a strong, bold Tarantula, one moreover who appears to be very hungry. I put the bottle baited with a Carpenter-bee upside down over her door. The Bee buzzes gravely in her glass bell; the Spider comes up from the recesses of her cave; she is on the threshold, but inside; she looks; she waits. I also wait. The quarters, the half-hours pass; nothing happens. The Spider goes down again: she probably thought the attempt too dangerous. I try in this way three more Tarantulas, but cannot make them leave their lairs.
At last I have better success. A Spider suddenly rushes from her hole: she is unusually warlike, doubtless because she is very hungry. She attacks the Bee in the bottle, and the combat lasts for but the twinkling of an eye. The sturdy Carpenter-bee is dead. Where did the murderess strike her? Right in the nape of the neck; her fangs are still there. She has the knowledge which I suspected: she has bitten the only point she could bite to produce sudden death. She has struck the center of the victim’s nervous system.
I make more experiments and find that it is only once in a while that the Tarantula will come out to fight the Carpenter-bee, but each time that she does so she kills it in the same way. The reason of the Tarantula’s hesitation is plain. An insect of this kind cannot be seized recklessly: the Tarantula who missed her strike by biting at random would do so at the risk of her life. Stung in any other place, the Bee might live for hours and manage to sting her foe with her poisoned dagger. The Spider is well aware of this. In the safe shelter of her threshold she watches for the right moment; she waits for the big Bee to face her, when the neck is easily grabbed.
