I found that the best method to secure the wily Tarantula was to procure a supply of live Bumble-bees. I put one into a little bottle with a mouth just wide enough to cover the opening of the burrow; and I turned the apparatus thus baited over the opening. The powerful Bee at first fluttered and hummed about her glass prison; then, seeing a burrow like that made by her own family, she went into it without much hesitation. She was very foolish: while she went down, the Spider came up; and the meeting took place in the perpendicular passage. For a few moments, I heard a sort of death-song: it was the humming of the poor Bumble-bee. This was followed by a long silence. I removed the bottle and explored the pit with a pair of pincers. I brought out the Bumble-bee, motionless, dead. A terrible tragedy must have happened. The Spider followed, refusing to let go so rich a booty. Game and huntress were brought outside the hole, which I stopped up with a pebble. Outside her own house the Tarantula is timid and hardly able to run away. To push her with a straw into a paper bag was the work of a second. Soon I had a colony of Tarantulas in my laboratory.
I did not give the Tarantula the Bee merely in order to capture her. I wished to know also her manner of hunting. I knew that she is one of those insects who live from day to day on what they kill. She does not store up preserved food for her children, like the Beetles; she is not a “paralyzer,” like the Wasps you have read about, who cleverly spare their game so as to leave it a glimmer of life and keep it fresh for weeks at a time; she is a killer, who makes a meal off her capture on the spot. I wished to find out how she kills them so quickly.
She does not go in for peaceable game. The big Grasshopper, with the powerful jaws, the Bee and other wearers of poisoned daggers must fall into her hole from time to time, and the duel she fights with them is nearly equal as far as weapons go. For the poisonous fangs of the Spider the Wasp has her poisoned dagger or sting. Which of the two bandits shall have the best of it? The Tarantula has no second means of defense, no cord to bind her victim, as the Garden Spiders have. These cover the captives with their silk, making all resistance impossible. The Tarantula has a riskier job. She has only her courage and her fangs, and she must leap upon her dangerous prey and kill it quickly. She must know exactly where to strike, for, strong though her poison is, I cannot believe it would kill the prey instantly at any point where she happens to bite. She must bite in some spot of vital importance.
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.