The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles 



my observations. This bank, baked by the 

 sun, is exploited by numerous swarms of 

 Anthophorae, who, more industrious than 

 their congeners, are in the habit of building, 

 at the entrance to their corridors, with serp- 

 entine fillets of earth, a vestibule, a defensive 

 bastion in the form of an arched cylinder. 

 In a word, they are swarms of A. parietina. 

 A sparse carpet of turf extends from the 

 edge of the road to the foot of the bank. 

 The more confortably to follow the work of 

 the Bees, in the hope of wresting some secret 

 from them, I had been lying for a few 

 moments upon this turf, in the very heart of 

 the inoffensive swarm, when my clothes were 

 invaded by legions of little yellow lice, run- 

 ning with desperate eagerness through the 

 hairy thickets of the nap of the cloth. In 

 these tiny creatures, with which I was pow- 

 dered here and there as with yellow dust, I 

 soon recognized an old acquaintance, the 

 young Oil-beetles, whom I now saw for the 

 first time elsewhere than in the Bees' fur or 

 the interior of their cells. I could not lose so 

 excellent an opportunity of learning how 

 these larvae manage to establish themselves 

 upon the bodies of their foster-parents. 



In the grass where, after lying down for 

 a moment, I had caught these lice were a 

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