a pea.

The grubs have to open a tiny passage for themselves and to make their
own way into the fruit, of which they eat the pulp. Each globule
harbours one larva, no more, or the ration would be insufficient.
Often, however, I see two, three or four eggs on the same fruit. The
first grub hatched is the one favoured by luck. He becomes the owner
of the pill, an intolerant owner capable of wringing the neck of any
who should come and sit down at table beside him. Always and
everywhere this pitiless competition!

The grub of the Twelve-spotted Crioceris is a dull white, with an
interrupted black scarf on the first segment of the thorax. This
sedentary creature has none of the talents of the acrobat grazing on
the swaying foliage of the asparagus; it cannot take a grip with its
posterior, turned into a prehensile finger. What use would it have for
such a prerogative, loving repose as it does and destined to put on
fat in its cell, without roaming in quest of food? In the same group
each species has its own gifts, according to the kind of life that
awaits it.

It is not long before the occupied fruit falls to the ground. Day by
day, it loses its green colour as the pulp is consumed. It becomes, at
last, a pretty, diaphanous opal sphere, while the berries which have
not been injured ripen on the plant and acquire a rich scarlet hue.

When there is nothing left to eat inside the skin of its pill, the
grub makes a hole in it and goes underground. The Tachinae have spared
it. Its opal box, the hard rind of the berry, has ensured its safety
just as well as a filthy overcoat would have done and perhaps even
better.

CHAPTER XVII
THE CRIOCERES (_continued_)

The Crioceris has found safety inside its opal globe. Safety? Ah, but
what an unfortunate expression I have used! Is there any one in the
world who can flatter himself that he has escaped the spoiler?

In the middle of July, at the time when the Twelve-spotted Crioceris
comes up from under the ground in the adult form, my rearing-jars
yield me swarms of a very small Gall-fly, a slender, graceful,
blue-black Chalcid, without any visible boring-tool. Has the puny
creature a name? Have the nomenclators catalogued it? I do not know,
nor do I much care; the main thing is to learn that the covering of
the asparagus-berry, which becomes an opal globe when the grub has
emptied it, has failed to save the recluse. The Tachina-midge drains
her victim by herself; this ot