The Sacred Beetle, and Others

by Jean-Henri Fabre

This rarely happens under natural conditions, because of the roughness of the ground, which is full of stones and flints. Sites practicable for easy digging are few and far between; and the insect has to roam about, with its burden, to find them. In my cages, on the other hand, where the layer of earth has been passed through a sieve, it is the usual case. Here the soil is easy to dig at any point; and so the mother, who is anxious to get her eggs laid, merely lowers the nearest lump underground, without waiting to give it any definite form.

Whether this storing without any preliminary modelling or carting take place in the fields or in my cages, the ultimate [[75]]result is most striking. One day, I see a shapeless lump disappear into the crypt. Next day, or the day after, I visit the workshop and find the artist in front of her work. The original formless mass, the armfuls of scrapings carried down, have become a pear perfect in outline and exquisitely finished.

The artistic object bears the marks of its method of manufacture. The part that rests upon the bottom of the cavity is crusted over with earthy particles; all the rest is of a glossy polish. Owing to its weight, owing also to the pressure exercised when the Beetle manipulated it, the pear, while still quite soft, became soiled with grains of earth on the side that touched the floor of the workshop; on the remainder, which is the larger part, it has retained the delicate finish which the insect was able to give it.

The inferences to be drawn from these carefully noted details are obvious: the pear is no turner’s work; it has not been obtained by any sort of rolling on the ground of the spacious studio, for in that case it would have been soiled with earth all over. Besides, its projecting neck eliminates this method of fabrication. And its unblemished upper surface is eloquent testimony that it has not even been turned from one side to the other. The Beetle, therefore, has moulded it where it lies, without turning or shifting it at all; she has modelled it with little taps of her broad paddles, just as we saw her model her ball in the daylight.

Let us now return to what usually happens in the free state. The materials then come from a distance and are carried into the burrow in the form of a ball covered with soil on every part of its surface. What will the insect do with this sphere which contains the paunch of the future [[76]]pear ready-made? It would be easy to answer this if I concerned myself only with results, without troubling how those results were obtained. It would be enough for me, as I have often done, to capture the mother in her burrow with her ball and take the whole lot home, to my insect laboratory, in order to keep a close watch on events.

I fill a large glass jar with earth, sifted, moistened and heaped to the desired depth. I place the mother and the beloved pill which she is clasping on the surface of this artificial soil. I stow away the apparatus in a dim corner and wait. My patience is not tried very long. Urged by the insistent ovaries, the Beetle resumes her interrupted work.

In certain cases, I see her, still on the surface, destroying her ball, ripping it up, cutting it to pieces, shredding it. This is not in the least the act of one in despair who, finding herself a captive, breaks the precious object in her madness. It is based on sound hygienics. A scrupulous inspection of the morsel which she has gathered in haste, among lawless competitors, is often necessary, for supervision is not always easy on the harvest-field itself, in the midst of thieves and robbers. The ball may be harbouring a collection of little Onthophagi and Aphodii who passed unnoticed in the heat of acquisition.

These involuntary intruders, finding themselves very well-off in the heart of the mass, would make good use of the future pear, much to the detriment of the legitimate consumer. The ball must be purged of this hungry brood. The mother, therefore, pulls it to pieces and scrutinizes the fragments closely. Then the sorted bits are carefully put together again and the ball remade, this time without any earthy rind. It is dragged underground and becomes [[77]]an immaculate pear, always excepting the surface touching the soil.

Oftener still, the ball is thrust by the mother into the soil in the jar just as I took it from the burrow, still with the rough crust which it has acquired in its cross-country rolling from the place where it was obtained to the place where the insect intends to use it. In that event, I find it at the bottom of my jar transformed into a pear, but still rough and encrusted with earth and sand over the whole of its surface, thus proving that the pear-shaped outline has not demanded a general recasting of the mass, inside as well as out, but has been obtained by simple pressure and by drawing out the neck.

This is how, in the vast majority of cases, things happen under normal conditions. Almost all the pears that I dig up in the fields have rinds and are unpolished, some more, others less. If we put on one side the inevitable incrustations due to the carting-process, these blemishes would seem to point to a prolonged rolling in the interior of the subterranean manor. The few which I find perfectly smooth, especially those wonderfully neat specimens furnished by my cages, dispel this mistake entirely. They show us that, when the materials are collected near the burrow and stored away unshaped, the pear is modelled wholly without rolling; they prove to us that, in other cases, the lines of earth and grit on the outside of the ball are not a sign of its having been rolled to and fro in the workshop, but are simply the marks of a fairly long journey on the surface of the ground.