Cases of this kind occur too seldom to satisfy fully the curiosity of a seasoned observer. I should have liked to arrange the mist-screen myself and thus to try a few experiments bearing upon the dangerous crossing; but I was a stranger, a spectator by sheer chance; and all that I could do was to trust to luck, without interfering with the washing-operations and perhaps upsetting them. What a sorry idea the housewife engaged on that grave business would have had of my intelligence if I had ventured to touch her fire in order to worry a Wasp!
“I’a pétan cièucle: little things please little minds,” she would have been sure to think.
In the eyes of the peasant, to occupy one’s self with such small fry is a lunatic’s game, the amusement of a cracked mind.
Once and once only fortune smiled upon me; but I was not ready to profit by it. The thing took place at my own house, by my own fireside and, as it happened, on a washing-day. I had not long been appointed [[65]]to the Avignon grammar-school. It was close upon two o’clock; and in a few minutes the roll of the drum would summon me to display the properties of the Leyden jar to an audience of wool-gatherers. I was preparing to start, when I saw a strange, agile insect, with a slender body and a gourd-shaped abdomen slung at the end of a long thread, dart through the reek rising from the wash-tub. It was the Pelopæus, whom I saw for the first time with observant eyes. A novice still and anxious to become better-acquainted with my visitor, I fervently commended the insect to the watchful care of the household, begging them not to disturb it in my absence and to manage the fire in such a way as not to inconvenience it in its plucky work of building the walls of its nest right beside the flame. My wishes were carried out religiously.
Things went better than I dared hope. On my return, the Pelopæus was continuing her mason’s work behind the steam of the wash-tub, which stood under the mantel of a wide chimney. Eager as I was to witness the construction of the cells, to identify the nature of the provisions, to follow the evolution of the larvæ, all of them [[66]]biological details entirely new to me, I took good care not to raise the experimental obstacles which I should not fail to set in the path of instinct to-day: a good nest was the sole object that I coveted. Therefore, so far from creating fresh difficulties for the Pelopæus, I did my utmost to reduce those which she had to overcome. I raked the fire, making it much smaller, so as to decrease the volume of smoke in the Wasp’s building-yard; and for a good two hours I watched her diving through the cloud. Next day, the usual niggardly fire was burning intermittently; and there was nothing now to hamper the Pelopæus, who continued her work for some days and without further impediment completed the well-filled nest which was the object of my wishes.
Never again, in the forty years that followed, was my fireplace honoured with such a visit; and it was only by having recourse to the more fortunate hearths of my neighbours that I was able to glean my little bit of information. Nor was it until much later that, profiting by long experience, I had the idea of turning to account the predilection of so many Bees and Wasps for their birthplace and for founding a [[67]]family in the neighbourhood of the nest where they receive perhaps the strongest of all impressions, the first dawn of light. I took Pelopæus-nests which I had collected more or less everywhere during the winter and fixed them in different places, in my present house, which, judging by the sum total of my observations, I considered suitable, notably at the entrance to the chimney both of the kitchen and of the study. I put some in the embrasures of the windows, keeping the outside shutters closed to obtain the requisite sultriness; I stuck some to the dimly-lighted corners of the ceilings. It was in these sites of my choosing that the new generation was to hatch when summer came; it was here that it would settle: at least I thought so. Then I could have conducted in my own way the experiments which I had in mind.
My attempts invariably failed. Not one of my charges returned to the native nest; the less fickle of them contented themselves with brief visits, soon followed by a departure for good. The Pelopæus, it appears, is of a solitary and vagrant disposition: save in exceptionally favourable circumstances, she builds a lonely nest and is quite ready to change her locality from [[68]]generation to generation. As a matter of fact, though this Wasp is fairly common in my village, her dwellings are nearly always scattered one by one, with no traces of any old nests near by. The place of her birth leaves no lasting recollection in the nomad’s memory; and none comes to build beside the ruins of the maternal home.
For that matter, my want of success might well be due to another cause. The Pelopæus certainly is not rare in our southern towns; nevertheless she prefers the peasant’s smoky house to the townsman’s white villa. Nowhere have I seen her so plentiful as in my village, with its tumbledown cottages guiltless of rough-cast and burnt yellow by the sun. My hermitage is not quite so rustic as that: it is a little neater and cleaner; and there is nothing to show that my visitors did not forsake my kitchen and my study, both too sumptuous in their opinion, to go and settle somewhere near in lodgings more to their taste. And so the eagerly desired colonists, who were to have peopled my workroom crammed with books, plants, fossils and entomological cemeteries, took their departure, scorning all that scientific luxury; they went away in search of some [[69]]dim chamber with a solitary window sporting a sprig of wall-flower in an old, cracked stew-pot. Felicities like that are reserved for the humble; and I am therefore reduced to what I have gained by an occasional piece of good luck, irrespective of any efforts of mine. The little that I have seen, in one direction and another, is after all sufficient evidence of the pluck of the Pelopæus, who, to reach her nest built in a corner of the hearth, at times passes through a cloud of steam and smoke. Would she dare to cross a thin sheet of flame? That was what I had proposed to see, if my attempts to acclimatize her in my home had met with any success.
It is obvious that, in displaying a marked predilection for the chimney as her abode, the Pelopæus is not seeking her own comfort: the site chosen means work and dangerous work. She seeks the welfare of her family. This family then, in order to prosper, must require a high temperature, such as is not demanded by the other Wasps or Bees, the Chalicodoma and the Osmia, for instance, who find sufficient shelter under a mortar dome or in the hollow of an exposed reed. Let us see what temperature the Pelopæus finds to her liking. [[70]]
On the side-wall, under the chimneypiece, I hung a thermometer over a Pelopæus-nest. During an hour’s observation, with a fire giving out a moderate heat, it fluctuated between 95° and 105° F. This temperature, it is true, does not remain the same during the long larval period; on the contrary, it varies greatly, according to the season of the year and the time of day. I wanted something better and I found it on two occasions.