Once the burrow is supplied with the voluminous loaf out of which three or four pilular rations are to be carved, the mother does not appear outside again. Besides, there is no provision made for her. The heap stored away below is the family cake, the exclusive patrimony of the grubs, who will receive equal shares. For four months, therefore, the recluse is without food of any kind.
It is a voluntary privation. Victuals are there, within reach, copious and of superior quality; but they are intended for the larvæ and the mother will take good care not to touch them: anything abstracted for her own use would mean so much less for the grubs. Gluttonous at the outset, when there was no family to consider, she now becomes very abstemious, even to the point of prolonged fasting. The Hen sitting on her eggs forgets to eat for some weeks; the watchful Copris mother forgets it during a third part of the year. The Dung-beetle outdoes the bird in maternal self-abnegation.
Now what does this self-sacrificing mother do underground? To what household cares can she devote the period of so long a fast? My appliances provide a satisfactory answer. I possess, as I have said, two kinds. One consists of glass jars with a thin layer of sand and a cardboard case to create darkness; the other of large pots filled with earth and closed with a pane of glass.
At any moment when I raise the opaque sheath of the first, I find the mother now perched upon the top of her ovoids, now on the ground, half-erect, smoothing the bulging curve with her fore-leg. On rarer occasions, she is dozing in the midst of the heap.
The manner in which she employs her time is obvious. She watches her treasure of pills; her inquisitive antennæ sound them to discover what is happening inside; she [[166]]listens to the nurselings growing; she touches up faulty spots; she polishes and repolishes the surfaces in order to delay the desiccation within until the development of the inmates is complete.
These scrupulous cares, cares occupying every moment, have results which would strike the attention of the least-experienced observer. The egg-shaped vessels, or better the cradles of the nursery, are wonderful in their regular curves and in their neatness. We see none of those chinks with a blob of putty showing through, none of those cracks, of those peeling scales, in short none of those defects which, towards the end, nearly always disfigure the Sacred Beetle’s pears, handsome though they be at the start.
The horned Dung-beetle’s caskets could not be better shaped, even after they are thoroughly dried up, if they had been worked in plaster by a modeller. What pretty, dark-bronze eggs they are, rivalling the Owl’s in size and form! This irreproachable perfection, maintained until the shell is burst by the emerging larva, is obtained only by incessant touching up, interspersed at long intervals with periods of rest during which the mother composes herself for a nap at the foot of the heap.
The glass jars leave room for doubt. It is possible to say that the insect, imprisoned in an impassable enclosure, stays in the midst of its pills because it is unable to go elsewhere. I agree; but there remains that work of polishing and of continual inspection about which the mother need not trouble at all if these cares did not form part of her habits. Were she solely anxious to recover her liberty, she ought to be roaming restlessly all round the enclosure, whereas I always see her very quiet and absorbed. The only evidence of her excitement, when the raising of the cardboard cylinder suddenly produces daylight, is that [[167]]she lets herself slide from the top of a pill and hides in the heap. If I moderate the light, composure is soon restored and she resumes her position on the summit, there to continue the work which my visit interrupted.
For the rest, the evidence of the apparatus that is always in darkness is conclusive. The mother buried herself in June in the sand of my pots with copious provisions, which are soon converted into a certain number of pills. She is at liberty to return to the surface when she pleases. She will there find broad daylight under the big sheet of glass which ensures me against her escape; she will find food, which I renew from time to time in order to entice her.
Well, neither the daylight nor the food, desirable though this must seem to be after a fast so long extended, is able to tempt her. Nothing stirs in my pots, nothing rises to the surface until the rains come.