86 FABRE'S BOOK OF INSECTS 



And this upside-down position, which seems to us so trying, 

 lasts for no short while. It continues, in my cages, for ten 

 months without a break. The Fly on the ceiling, it is true, 

 adopts the same position ; but she has her moments of rest. 

 She flies, she walks in the usual way, she spreads herself flat 

 in the sun. The Empusa, on the other hand, remains in her 

 curious attitude for ten months on end, without a pause. 

 Hanging from the wire netting, back downwards, she hunts, 

 eats, digests, dozes, gets through all the experiences of an 

 insect's life, and finally dies. She clambers up while she is 

 still quite young ; she falls down in her old age, a corpse. 



This custom is all the more remarkable in that it is prac- 

 tised only in captivity. It is not an instinctive habit of the 

 race ; for out of doors the insect, except at rare intervals, 

 stands on the bushes back upwards. 



Strange as the performance is, I know of a similar case 

 that is even more peculiar : the attitude of certain Wasps 

 and Bees during the night's rest. A particular Wasp, an 

 Ammophila with red fore-legs, is plentiful in my enclosure 

 towards the end of August, and likes to sleep in one of the 

 lavender borders. At dusk, especially after a stifling day 

 when a storm is brewing, I am sure to find the strange sleeper 

 settled there. Never was a more eccentric attitude chosen 

 for a night's rest. The jaws bite right into the lavender- 

 stem. Its square shape supplies a firmer hold than a round 

 stalk would give. With this one and only prop the Wasp's 

 body juts out stiffly at full length, with legs folded. It forms 

 a right angle with the stalk, so that the whole weight of the 

 insect rests upon the mandibles. 



The Ammophila is enabled by its mighty jaws to sleep 

 in this way, extended in space. It takes an animal to think 

 of a thing like that, which upsets all our previous ideas of 

 rest. Should the threatening storm burst and the stalk 

 sway in the wind, the sleeper is not troubled by her swing- 

 ing hammock ; at most, she presses her fore-legs for a moment 

 against the tossing stem. Perhaps the Wasp's jaws, like the 



