y are real corpses; they are manipulated, squeezed,
drained of their honey exactly as the others are. In all these respects,
there is no difference between the hunt conducted to provide food
for the larvae and the hunt conducted merely to gratify the mother's
appetite.

As the worries of captivity might well be the cause of a few anomalies
in the insect's actions, I felt that I ought to enquire how things
happen in the open. I lay in wait near some colonies of Philanthi,
for longer perhaps than the question deserved, as it had already been
settled by what had happened under glass. My tedious watches were
rewarded from time to time. Most of the huntresses returned home
immediately, with the Bee under their abdomen; some halted on the
brambles hard by; and here I saw them squeezing the dead Bee and making
her disgorge the honey, which was greedily lapped up. After these
preliminaries the corpse was stored. Every doubt is therefore removed:
the provisions of the larva are first carefully drained of their honey.

Since we are on the spot, let us prolong our stay and enquire into the
customs of the Philanthus in a state of liberty. Serving dead prey,
which goes bad in a few days, the Bee-huntress cannot adopt the method
of certain insects which paralyse a number of separate heads of game and
fill the cell with provisions, completing the ration before laying
the egg. She needs the method of the Bembex, whose larva receives
the necessary nourishment at intervals, as it grows larger. The facts
confirm this deduction. Just now I described as tedious my watches near
the colonies of the Philanthi. They were tedious in fact, even more so
perhaps than those which the Bembeces used to inflict upon me in the old
days. Outside the burrows of the Great Cerceris and other Weevil-lovers,
outside those of the Yellow-winged Sphex, the Cricket-slayer, there is
plenty of distraction, thanks to the bustling movement of the hamlet.
The mother has hardly come back home before she goes out again, soon
returning laden with a new prey and once more setting out upon the
chase. The going and coming is repeated at close intervals until the
warehouse is full.

The burrow of the Philanthus is far from showing any such animation,
even in a populous colony. In vain were my watches prolonged for whole
mornings or afternoons; it was but very rarely that the mother whom I
had seen go in with a Bee came out again for a second expedition. Two
captures at mo