The Common Wasp 



Day after day the catacombs of the 

 Wasps'-nest receive the dead and dying 

 hurled down from above, sickly larvae and 

 such Wasps as have been injured by accident. 

 Rare in the prosperous season, these falls 

 into the charnel-neap become increasingly 

 frequent as winter approaches. When the 

 late-born grubs are being exterminated and 

 above all at the moment of the final cata- 

 strophe, when the adults, males, females and 

 neuters, are dying in their thousands, the 

 manna descends in a copious downfall daily. 



The host of devourers has hastened up, 

 receiving only a little at first, but foreseeing 

 great junketings in the future. By the end 

 of November, the bottom of the crypt is a 

 swarming hostelry, dominated numerically 

 by the grubs of certain Flies, those under- 

 takers of the Wasps'-nests. I gather great 

 numbers of the larvae of the Volucella, who 

 deserves a chapter to herself, by reason of 

 her fame. I find here, poking its tapering 

 head into the bellies of the corpses, a naked, 

 white, pointed maggot, smaller than that of 

 the Lucilias. 1 It works promiscuously with 

 a second, even smaller grub, brown and clad 

 in a prickly smock. I come upon a dwarf 



Or Greenbottles. Cf. The Life of the Fly: chap. ix. 

 Translator's Note. 



285 



