FABRE'S BOOK OF INSECTS 



own meals, so the mother arranges that it shall find itself 

 surrounded by the food that suits it best. It can begin 

 eating at once, without further trouble. 



The egg is laid in the narrow end of the pear. Every 

 germ of life, whether of plant or animal, needs air : even 

 the shell of a bird's egg is riddled with an endless number 

 of pores. If the germ of the Scarab were in the thick 

 part of the pear it would be smothered, because there the 

 materials are very closely packed, and are covered with 

 a hard rind. So the mother Beetle prepares a nice airy 

 room with thin walls for her little grub to live in, during 

 its first moments. There is a certain amount of air even 

 in the very centre of the pear, but not enough for a deli- 

 cate baby-grub. By the time he has eaten his way to the 

 centre he is strong enough to manage with very little air. 



There is, of course, a good reason for the hardness of 

 the shell that covers the big end of the pear. The 

 Scarab's burrow is extremely hot: sometimes the tem- 

 perature reaches boiling point. The provisions, even 

 though they have to last only three or four weeks, are 

 liable to dry up and become uneatable. When, instead 

 of the soft food of its first meal, the unhappy grub finds 

 nothing to eat but horrible crusty stuff as hard as a peb- 

 ble, it is bound to die of hunger. I have found numbers 

 of these victims of the August sun. The poor things 

 are baked in a sort of closed oven. To lessen this danger 



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