第37章 THE TACHYTES(8)

To every insect also its own art of fashioning the cocoon, an art which varies greatly, an art in which the larva displays all the resources of its instincts. The Tachytes, the Bembeces, the Stizi, the Palari and other burrowers build composite cocoons, hard as fruit-stones, formed of an encrustation of sand in a network of silk. We are already acquainted with the work of the Bembex. I will recall the fact that their larva first weaves a conical, horizontal bag of pure white silk, with wide meshes, held in place by interlaced threads which fix it to the walls of the cell. Ihave compared this bag, because of its shape, with a fishtrap. Without leaving this hammock, stretching its neck through the orifice, the worker gathers from without a little heap of sand, which it stores inside its workshop. Then, selecting the grains one by one, it encrusts them all around itself in the fabric of the bag and cements them with the fluid from its spinnerets, which hardens at once. When this task is finished, the house has still to be closed, for it has been wide open all this time to permit of the renewal of the store of sand as the heap inside becomes exhausted. For this purpose a cap of silk is woven across the opening and finally encrusted with the materials which the larva has retained at its disposal.

The Tachytes builds in quite another fashion, although its work, once finished, does not differ from that of the Bembex. The larva surrounds itself, to begin with, about the middle of its body with a silken girdle which a number of threads, very irregularly distributed, hold in place and connect with the walls of the cell. Sand is collected, within reach of the worker, on this general scaffolding. Then begins the work of minor masonry, with grains of sand for rubble and the secretion of the spinnerets for cement. The first course is laid upon the fore-edge of the suspensory ring.

When the circle is completed, a second course of grains of sand, stuck together by the fluid silk, is raised upon the hardened edge of what has just been done. Thus the work proceeds, by ring-shaped courses, laid edge to edge, until the cocoon, having acquired half of its proper length, is rounded into a cap and finally is closed. The building-methods of the Tachytes-larva remind me of a mason constructing a round chimney, a narrow tower of which he occupies the centre. Turning on his own axis and using the materials placed to his hand, he encloses himself little by little in his sheath of masonry. In the same way the worker encloses itself in its mosaic. To build the second half of the cocoon, the larva turns round and builds in the same way on the other edge of the original ring. In about thirty-six hours the solid shell is completed.

I am rather interested to see the Bembex and the Tachytes, two workers in the same guild, employ such different methods to achieve the same result.

The first begins by weaving an eel-trap of pure silk and next encrusts the grains of sand inside; the second, a bolder architect, is economical of the silk envelope, confines itself to a hanging girdle and builds course by course. The building-materials are the same: sand and silk; the surroundings amid which the two artisans work are the same: a cell in a soil of sandy gravel; yet each of the builders possesses its individual art, its own plan, its one method.