Undeceived by the facts, I hasten to apologise and
express my esteem for the Philanthus. In emptying the stomach of the bee
the mother is performing the most praiseworthy of all duties; she is
guarding her family against poison. If she sometimes kills on her own
account and abandons the body after exhausting it of honey, I dare not
call her action a crime. When the habit has once been formed of emptying
the bee's crop for the best of motives, the temptation is great to do so
with no other excuse than hunger. Moreover--who can say?--perhaps there
is always some afterthought that the larvae might profit by the
sacrifice. Although not carried into effect the intention excuses the
act.

I therefore withdraw my abusive epithets in order to express my
admiration of the creature's maternal logic. Honey would be harmful to
the grubs. How does the mother know that honey, in which she herself
delights, is noxious to her young? To this question our knowledge has no
reply. But honey, as we have seen, would endanger the lives of the
grubs. The bees must therefore be emptied of honey before they are fed
to them. The process must be effected without wounding the victim, for
the larva must receive the latter fresh and moist; and this would be
impracticable if the insect were paralysed on account of the natural
resistance of the organs. The bee must therefore be killed outright
instead of being paralysed, otherwise the honey could not be removed.
Instantaneous death can be assured only by a lesion of the primordial
centre of life. The sting must therefore pierce the cervical ganglions;
the centre of innervation upon which the rest of the organism is
dependent. This can only be reached in one way: through the neck. Here
it is that the sting will be inserted; and here it is inserted in a
breach in the armour no larger than a pin's head. Suppress a single link
of this closely knit chain, and the Philanthus reared upon the flesh of
bees becomes an impossibility.

That honey is fatal to larvae is a fact pregnant with consequences.
Various predatory insects feed their young with honey-makers. Such, to
my knowledge, are the _Philanthus coronatus_, Fabr., which stores its
burrows with the large Halictus; the _Philanthus raptor_, Lep., which
chases all the smaller Halictus indifferently, being itself a small
insect; the _Cerceris ornata_, Fabr., which also kills Halictus; and the
_Polaris flavipes_, Fabr., which by a strange eclecticism fills