386 RAVAGES OF INSECTS. 



about the end of June or beginning of July ; and when in 

 danger they run rather than fly, gliding with such celerity 

 that they can easily elude the vigilance of the bees, which, 

 indeed, if we may trust Swammerdam, never attack them, 

 nor prevent their entrance into the hives, unless they 

 chance to brush against them in their passage. But 

 Eeaumur actually saw the bees pursue one, though without 

 success. It becomes easy for a moth, at all events, to lay 

 eggs among the combs ; or, as Keys says, at the entrance of 

 the hive: this writer adds, "she spins a close and strong 

 web to defend the young;"* which is impossible, as no 

 insect, subsequent to its larva state, can spin. 



The caterpillar of the first species, " wherever it passes," 

 says Swammerdam, " gnaws round holes through the waxen 

 cells, one caterpillar sometimes breaking open and destroy- 

 ing fifty or sixty cells. AVherever it penetrates it always 

 fabricates a hollow tubulated web, in which, as a rabbit in 

 its burrow, it can very swiftly pass from one part to another, 

 and speedily run back again. It fills the whole comb with 

 such webs, and turns itself in them every way into various 

 bendings and windings ; so that the bees are not only per- 

 plexed and disturbed in their work, but they frequently 

 entangle themselves by the claws and hairs of their legs in 

 those webs, and the whole hive is destroyed." 



The other species he accuses of being not only destruc- 

 tive to the wax, but to the bees themselves. "I saw one 

 of these little caterpillars," he says, " whilst it was still 

 small, and was breaking the cells in which the pupa of the 

 'bees lie, and eating the wax there, cover up these pupae 

 with its excrements, so that they could scarcely be known." 

 He adds with great naivete, " I have learned these matters 

 much against my inclination, and have been full of wrath 

 against the insect for thus defiling and killing some bee 

 pupse which I had designed to observe in their changes."t 



M. Bazin, a friend of Eeaumur's, discovered the cater- 

 pillar of a moth of this order feeding on chocolate, of wiiich 

 it seemed very choice, always preferring that which had the 



* Keys, Treatise on Bees, p. 178, edit. 1814. 

 t Swammerdam, vol. i. p. 225. 



