In the caressing sunlight of ten o’clock in the morning the mother runs up and down the chosen pod, first on one side, then on the other, with a jerky, capricious, unmethodical gait.  She repeatedly extrudes a short oviduct, which oscillates right and left as though to graze the skin of the pod.  An egg follows, which is abandoned as soon as laid.

A hasty touch of the oviduct, first here, then there, on the green skin of the pea-pod, and that is all.  The egg is left there, unprotected, in the full sunlight.  No choice of position is made such as might assist the grub when it seeks to penetrate its larder.  Some eggs are laid on the swellings created by the peas beneath; others in the barren valleys which separate them.  The first are close to the peas, the second at some distance from them.  In short, the eggs of the Bruchus are laid at random, as though on the wing.

We observe a still more serious vice:  the number of eggs is out of all proportion to the number of peas in the pod.  Let us note at the outset that each grub requires one pea; it is the necessary ration, and is largely sufficient to one larva, but is not enough for several, nor even for two.  One pea to each grub, neither more nor less, is the unchangeable rule.

We should expect to find signs of a procreative economy which would impel the female to take into account the number of peas contained in the pod which she has just explored; we might expect her to set a numerical limit on her eggs in conformity with that of the peas available.  But no such limit is observed.  The rule of one pea to one grub is always contradicted by the multiplicity of consumers.

My observations are unanimous on this point.  The number of eggs deposited on one pod always exceeds the number of peas available, and often to a scandalous degree.  However meagre the contents of the pod there is a superabundance of consumers.  Dividing the sum of the eggs upon such or such a pod by that of the peas contained therein, I find there are five to eight claimants for each pea; I have found ten, and there is no reason why this prodigality should not go still further.  Many are called, but few are chosen!  What is to become of all these supernumeraries, perforce excluded from the banquet for want of space?

The eggs are of a fairly bright amber yellow, cylindrical in form, smooth, and rounded at the ends.  Their length is at most a twenty-fifth of an inch.  Each is affixed to the pod by means of a slight network of threads of coagulated albumen.  Neither wind nor rain can loosen their hold.

The mother not infrequently emits them two at a time, one above the other; not infrequently, also, the uppermost of the two eggs hatches before the other, while the latter fades and perishes.  What was lacking to this egg, that it should fail to produce a grub?  Perhaps a bath of sunlight; the incubating heat of which the outer egg has robbed it.  Whether on account of the fact that it is shadowed by the other egg, or for other reasons, the elder of the eggs in a group of two rarely follows the normal course, but perishes on the pod, dead without having lived.