II
THE WAY OUT
There are other grub-eaters which drain their victims without wounding them, but not one, among those I know, reaches such perfection in this art as the Anthrax-grub. Nor can any be compared with the Anthrax as regards the means brought into play in order to leave the [[257]]cell. The others, when they become perfect insects, have implements for mining and demolishing. They have stout mandibles, capable of digging the ground, of pulling down clay partition-walls, and even of grinding the Mason-bee’s tough cement to powder. The Anthrax, in her final form, has nothing like this. Her mouth is a short, soft proboscis, good at most for soberly licking the sugary fluid from the flowers. Her slim legs are so feeble that to move a grain of sand would be too heavy a task for them, enough to strain every joint. Her great stiff wings, which must remain full-spread, do not allow her to slip through a narrow passage. Her delicate suit of downy velvet, from which you take the bloom by merely breathing on it, could not withstand the contact of rough tunnels. She is unable to enter the Mason-bee’s cells to lay her egg, and equally unable to leave it when the time comes to free herself and appear in broad daylight.
And the grub, for its part, is powerless to prepare the way for the coming flight. That buttery little cylinder, owning no tools but a sucker so flimsy and small that it is barely visible through the magnifying-glass, is even weaker than the full-grown insect, which at least flies and walks. The Mason-bee’s cell seems to this creature like a granite cave. How can it get out? The problems would be insoluble to these two incapables, if nothing else played its part. [[258]]
Among insects the pupa—the transition stage, when the creature is no longer a grub but is not yet a perfect insect—is generally a striking picture of complete weakness. A sort of mummy, tightly bound in swaddling-clothes, motionless and unconscious, it awaits its transformation. Its tender flesh is hardly solid; its limbs are transparent as crystals, and are held fixed in their place, lest a movement should disturb the work of development. In the same way, to secure his recovery, a patient whose bones are broken is held bound in the surgeon’s bandages.
THE ANTHRAX FLY
Her delicate suit of downy velvet, from which you take the bloom by merely breathing on it, could not withstand the contact of rough tunnels
Well, here, by a strange reversal of the usual state of things, a stupendous task is laid upon the pupa of the Anthrax. It is the pupa that has to toil, to strive, to exhaust itself in efforts to burst the wall and open the way out. To the pupa falls the desperate duty, to the full-grown insect the joy of resting in the sun. The result of these unusual conditions is that the pupa possesses a strange and complicated set of tools that is in no way suggested by the grub nor recalled by the perfect Fly. This set of tools includes a collection of ploughshares, gimlets, hooks, spears, and other implements that are not found in our trades nor named in our dictionaries. I will do my best to describe the strange gear.