The dough-maker’s assiduity, her patient cares make me suspect a delay in the manufacture whereof I was far from dreaming. Why so many after-touches to the block, why so long a wait before employing it? A week and more passes, in fact, before the insect, ever pressing and polishing, decides to use its hoard.
The baker, when he has kneaded his dough to the desired extent, collects it into a single heap in a corner of the kneading-trough. The heat of the panary fermentation smoulders better in the heart of the voluminous mass. The Copris knows this secret of the bake-house. She collects the sum total of her harvests into a single lump; she carefully kneads the whole into a provisional loaf which she gives time to improve by means of an inner labour that makes the paste more palatable and gives it a degree of consistency favourable to subsequent manipulations. As long as the chemical work remains unfinished, both the journeyman-baker and the Copris wait. To the insect this means a long spell, a week at least.
It is done. The baker’s man divides his lump into smaller lumps, each of which will become a loaf. The [[72]]Copris acts likewise. By means of a circular gash made with the cleaver of the shield and the saw of the fore-legs, she separates from the main body a section of the prescribed size. For this stroke of the trencher, no hesitation is needed, no after-touches that add or subtract. Off-hand and with a plain, decisive cut, a lump is obtained of the requisite bulk.
Fig. 5.—The Copris’s pill: first state.
It now becomes a question of shaping it. Clasping it as best it can in its short arms, so incompatible, one would think, with work of this kind, the insect rounds the section by the one and only means of pressure. It gravely moves about the hitherto shapeless ball, climbs up, climbs down; it turns to left and right, above and below; methodically, it presses a little more here, a little less there; it improves by new touches, with unchanging patience; and, in twenty-four hours’ time, the angular piece has become a perfect sphere, the size of a plum. In a corner of her crammed studio, the podgy artist, with hardly room to move, has finished her work without once shaking it on its base; by dint of time and patience, she has obtained the geometrical globe which her clumsy tools and her confined space seemed bound to refuse her.
PLATE IV
1 and 2. The Spanish Copris, male and female.
3. The pair jointly kneading the big loaf, which, divided into egg-shaped pills, will furnish provisions for each grub of the brood.