The laying is over. Here is the mother in her retreat, which is almost filled by the three or four cradles standing one against the other, pointed end upwards. What will she do now? Go away, no doubt, to recruit her strength a little in the open air after her prolonged fast. He who thinks so is mistaken. She stays. And yet she has eaten nothing since she came underground, taking good care not to touch the loaf, which, divided into equal portions, will provide the sustenance of the family. The Copris is touchingly scrupulous where the children’s inheritance is concerned: she is a devoted mother, who braves hunger rather than let her offspring suffer privation.
She braves it for a second reason: to mount guard around the cradles. From the end of June onwards the burrows are difficult to find, because the mounds disappear through the action of storm or wind or the feet of the passers-by. The few which I succeed in discovering always contain the mother dozing beside a group of pills, in each of which a grub, now nearing its complete development, feasts on the fat of the land.
My dark appliances, flower-pots filled with fresh sand, confirm what the fields have taught me. Buried with provisions in the first fortnight in May, the mothers do not reappear on the surface, under the glass lid. They keep hidden in the burrow after laying their eggs; they spend the sultry dog-days with their ovoids, watching them, no doubt, as the glass-jars, with their freedom from subterranean obscurity, tell us.
They come up again at the time of the first autumnal rains in September. But by then the new generation has attained its perfect form. The mother, therefore, enjoys in her underground home that rare privilege for an insect, the joy of knowing her family; she hears her [[139]]children scratching at the shell to obtain their liberty; she is present at the bursting of the casket which she has fashioned so conscientiously; maybe she helps the exhausted weaklings when the ground has not been cool enough to soften the walls. Mother and progeny leave the underworld together; and together they arrive at the autumn banquets, when the sun is mild and the ovine manna abounds along the paths.
The flower-pots teach us something else. I place on the surface a few separate couples taken from their burrows at the outset of the building-operations. They are given a generous supply of provisions. Each couple buries itself, settles down and starts hoarding; then, after ten days or so, the male reappears on the surface, under the sheet of glass. The other does not stir an inch. The eggs are laid, the food-balls are shaped, patiently rounded and grouped at the bottom of the pot. And all the time, so that he may not disturb the mother in her work, the father remains exiled from the gynæceum. He has climbed to the surface with the intention of going and digging himself a shelter elsewhere. Being unable to do so within the narrow confines of the pot, he stays at the top, barely concealed from view by a modicum of sand or a few scraps of food. A lover of darkness and of the cool underground depths, he remains obstinately for three months exposed to the air and drought and light; he refuses to go to earth, lest he should interfere with the sacred things that are taking place below. The Copris shall have a good mark for thus respecting the maternal apartments.
Let us come back to the jars, where the events hidden from us by the soil are to be enacted before our eyes. The three or four pills, each with its egg, stand one against another and occupy almost the whole enclosure, leaving [[140]]only narrow passages. Of the original lump very little remains, at the most a few crumbs, which come in handy when appetite returns. But that does not worry the mother much. She is far more concerned about her ovoids.
Assiduously she goes from one to another, feels them, listens to them, touches them up at points where my eye can perceive no flaw. Her clumsy, horn-shod foot, more sensitive in darkness than my retina in broad daylight, is perhaps discovering incipient cracks or defective workmanship in the matter of consistency which must be attended to, in order to prevent the air from entering and drying up the eggs. The prudent mother therefore slips in and out of the narrow spaces between the cradles, inspecting them carefully and remedying any accident, no matter how trifling. If I disturb her, she sometimes rubs the tip of her abdomen against the edge of her wing-cases, producing a soft rustling noise, which is almost a murmur of complaint. Thus, between scrupulous care and brief slumbers beside her group of cradles, the mother passes the three months essential to the evolution of the family.
I seem to catch a glimpse of the reason for this long watch. The pill-rollers, whether Scarabs or Gymnopleuri, never have more than a single pear, a single ovoid in their burrows. The mass of foodstuff, which at times is rolled from a great distance, is necessarily limited by the insect’s own limitations of strength. It is enough for one larva, but not enough for two. An exception must be made with respect to the Broad-necked Scarab, who brings up her family very frugally and divides her rolling booty into two modest portions.
The others are obliged to dig a special burrow for each egg. When everything is in order in the new establishment—and this does not take long—they leave the underground [[141]]vault and go off somewhere else, wherever chance may lead them, to begin their pill-rolling, excavating and egg-laying once more. With these nomadic habits, any prolonged supervision on the mother’s part becomes impossible.
The Scarab suffers by it. Her pear, which is magnificently regular at the outset, soon shows cracks and becomes scaly and swollen. Various cryptogams invade it and undermine it; the material expands and the resultant splitting causes the pear to lose its shape. We have seen how the grub combats these troubles.