roachable manner. The
parasite therefore established itself in the honey-warehouse before
the warehouse was closed; on the other hand, the open cells, full of
honey, but as yet without the egg of the Anthophora, are always free
from parasites. It is therefore during the laying, or afterwards, when
the Anthophora is occupied in plastering the door of the cell, that
the young larva gains admittance. It is impossible to decide by
experiment to which of these two periods we must ascribe the
introduction of the Sitares into the cell; for, however peaceable the
Anthophora may be, it is evident that we cannot hope to witness what
happens in the cell at the moment when she is laying an egg or at the
moment when she is making the lid. But a few attempts will soon
convince us that the only second which would allow the Sitaris to
establish itself in the home of the Bee is the very second when the
egg is laid on the surface of the honey.

Let us take an Anthophora-cell full of honey and furnished with an egg
and, after removing the lid, place it in a glass tube with a few
Sitaris-grubs. The grubs do not appear at all eager for this wealth of
nectar placed within their reach; they wander at random about the
tube, run about the outside of the cell, sometimes happen upon the
edge of the orifice and very rarely venture inside. When they do, they
do not go far in and they come out again at once. If one happens to
reach the honey, which only half fills the cell, it tries to escape as
soon as it has perceived the shifting nature of the sticky soil upon
which it was about to enter; but, tottering at every step, because of
the viscous matter clinging to its feet, it often ends by falling back
into the honey, where it dies of suffocation.

Again, we may experiment as follows: having prepared a cell as before,
we place a larva most carefully on its inner wall, or else on the
surface of the food itself. In the first case, the larva hastens to
leave the cell; in the second case, it struggles awhile on the surface
of the honey and ends by getting so completely caught that, after a
thousand efforts to gain the shore, it is swallowed up in the viscous
lake.

In short, all attempts to establish the Sitaris-grub in an
Anthophora-cell provisioned with honey and furnished with an egg are
no more successful than those which I made with cells whose store of
food had already been broached by the larva of the Bee, as described
above. It is therefore c