What does she do down below, in her cool cellar? Like the Copris mother apparently, she looks after her brood, going from cell to cell, sounding the cakes, investigating what is happening inside. It would be an act of barbarism to disturb her. We will wait till she comes out, accompanied by her offspring.
Let us profit by this long interval of rest to set forth the little that I have gathered from my attempts at rearing the Minotaur in a glass tube on the regulation diet. The [[145]]egg takes about four weeks to hatch. The first that I find, dating from the 17th of April, gives birth to a grub on the 15th of May. This slow process of hatching can be due only to an insufficiency of heat in the early spring: underground, at a depth of five feet, the temperature hardly varies.
For that matter, we shall see the larva likewise taking its time and going through the whole summer before changing into the adult insect. It is so snug inside a sausage, in a cellar free from atmospheric variations, far from the hurly-burly of the outer world, where rejoicings are not unattended by danger; it is so sweet to do nothing, to indulge in digestive slumbers! Why hurry? The bustle of active life will come but too soon. The Minotaurs seem to hold that opinion: they prolong as far as may be the bliss of infancy.
The grub which has just been born in the sand pegs away with its legs and mandibles, strains and heaves with its rump, makes itself a passage and, from one day to the next, reaches the provisions piled up above it. In the glass tube in which I rear it I see it climbing, slipping into crevices, making a selection from the food about it and capriciously [[146]]tasting on this side and on that. It coils and uncoils, it wriggles about, it sways to and fro. It is happy. So am I, to see it satisfied and glistening with health. I shall be able to watch its progress to the end.
In a couple of months’ time, now ascending, now descending through its column of food and stopping at the best places, it is a handsome larva, well-shaped, neither fat nor spare, not unlike the Cetonia-grub in appearance. Its hind-legs have none of the shocking irregularity that used to surprise me so greatly when I was studying the family of the Geotrupes.
The grub of the last-named has hind-legs weaker than the rest, twisted, unfit for walking and turned over on its back. It is born a cripple. The grub of the Minotaur, despite the close analogy between the two dung-workers, is exempt from this infirmity. Its third pair of legs is no less accurate in shape and arrangement than the two other pairs. Why is the Geotrupes knock-kneed at birth and his close kinsman perfect? This is one of those little secrets of which it is only fitting that we should know how to admit our ignorance.
The larval stage ends in the last days of [[147]]August. Under the grub’s digestive efforts, the food-column, while retaining its form and its dimensions, has been converted into a paste whose origin it would be impossible to recognize. There is not a crumb left in which the microscope can detect a fibre. The Sheep had already divided the vegetable matter very finely; the grub, an incomparable triturator, has taken the aforesaid matter and subdivided it yet further, grinding it after a fashion. In this way it extracts and uses the nutritive particles of which the Sheep’s fourfold stomach is unable to take advantage.
To dig itself a cell in this unctuous mass ought, according to our logic, to suit the grub, desirous of a yielding mattress for the nymph to lie on. We are mistaken in our suppositions. The grub retreats to the lower end of its column, retires into the sand where the hatching took place and there makes itself a hard, rough cavity. This aberration, which takes no account of the future nymph, and its delicate skin, would be likely to surprise us if the homely dwelling were not subjected to improvement.
The hermit’s wallet has retained a part of the digestive residues, residues destined to [[148]]disappear completely, for at the moment of the nymphosis the body must be free of any impurity. With this cement, which has undergone a prolonged refining in the intestine, the grub plasters its sandy wall. Using its round rump as a trowel, it smooths, polishes and repolishes the layer of stucco, until the rude cell of the start becomes a velvet-lined chamber.
All is ready for the stripping that releases the nymph. This nymph has peculiarities deserving special mention. The male’s trident, in particular, is already, both in shape and size, what it will be in the adult Beetle. At last, when October is at hand, I obtain the perfect insect. The total period of development, beginning with the egg, has lasted five months.