One thing I do see more clearly after all my experiments and research:  the tactics of the Philanthus.  As a witness of its ferocious feasting, the true motive of which was unknown to me, I treated it to all the unfavourable epithets I could think of; called it assassin, bandit, pirate, robber of the dead.  Ignorance is always abusive; the man who does not know is full of violent affirmations and malign interpretations.  Undeceived by the facts, I hasten to apologise and express my esteem for the Philanthus.  In emptying the stomach of the bee the mother is performing the most praiseworthy of all duties; she is guarding her family against poison.  If she sometimes kills on her own account and abandons the body after exhausting it of honey, I dare not call her action a crime.  When the habit has once been formed of emptying the bee’s crop for the best of motives, the temptation is great to do so with no other excuse than hunger.  Moreover—­who can say?—­perhaps there is always some afterthought that the larvae might profit by the sacrifice.  Although not carried into effect the intention excuses the act.

I therefore withdraw my abusive epithets in order to express my admiration of the creature’s maternal logic.  Honey would be harmful to the grubs.  How does the mother know that honey, in which she herself delights, is noxious to her young?  To this question our knowledge has no reply.  But honey, as we have seen, would endanger the lives of the grubs.  The bees must therefore be emptied of honey before they are fed to them.  The process must be effected without wounding the victim, for the larva must receive the latter fresh and moist; and this would be impracticable if the insect were paralysed on account of the natural resistance of the organs.  The bee must therefore be killed outright instead of being paralysed, otherwise the honey could not be removed.  Instantaneous death can be assured only by a lesion of the primordial centre of life.  The sting must therefore pierce the cervical ganglions; the centre of innervation upon which the rest of the organism is dependent.  This can only be reached in one way:  through the neck.  Here it is that the sting will be inserted; and here it is inserted in a breach in the armour no larger than a pin’s head.  Suppress a single link of this closely knit chain, and the Philanthus reared upon the flesh of bees becomes an impossibility.

That honey is fatal to larvae is a fact pregnant with consequences.  Various predatory insects feed their young with honey-makers.  Such, to my knowledge, are the Philanthus coronatus, Fabr., which stores its burrows with the large Halictus; the Philanthus raptor, Lep., which chases all the smaller Halictus indifferently, being itself a small insect; the Cerceris ornata, Fabr., which also kills Halictus; and the Polaris flavipes, Fabr., which by a strange eclecticism fills its cells with specimens of most of the Hymenoptera which are not beyond its powers.