The Anthrax-grub—the Bee’s uninvited guest—is fixed by its mouth or sucker to any convenient part of the plump Bee-grub. It is ready to break off its kiss suddenly, should anything disturb it, and to resume it as easily when it wishes. After three or four days of this curious contact the Bee-grub, formerly so fat, glossy, and healthy, begins to look withered. Her sides fall in, her fresh colour fades, her skin becomes covered with little folds, and she is evidently shrinking. A week is hardly passed when these signs of exhaustion increase to a startling degree. The victim is flabby and wrinkled, as though borne down by her own weight. If I move her from her place she flops and sprawls like a half-filled indiarubber bottle. But the kiss of the Anthrax goes on emptying her: soon she is but a sort of shrivelled bladder, growing smaller and smaller from hour to hour. At length, between the twelfth and fifteenth day, all that remains of the Mason-bee’s larva is a little white grain, hardly as large as a pin’s head. If I soften this small remnant in water, and then blow into it through a very fine glass tube, the skin fills out and resumes the shape of the larva. There is no outlet anywhere for the compressed air. It is intact: it is nowhere broken. This proves that, under the cupping-glass of the Anthrax, the skin has been drained through its pores. The devouring grub, in making its attack, chooses its moment very cunningly. It is but an atom. Its mother, a feeble Fly, has done nothing to help it. She has no weapons; and she is quite incapable of penetrating the Mason-bee’s fortress. The future meal of the Anthrax has not been paralysed, nor injured in any way. The parasite arrives—we shall presently see how; it arrives, scarcely visible, and having made its preparations it installs itself upon its monstrous victim, whom it is going to drain to the very husk. And the victim, though not paralysed nor in any way lacking in vitality, lets it have its way, and is sucked dry without a tremor or a quiver of resistance. No corpse could show greater indifference to a bite. Had the Anthrax-grub appeared upon the scene earlier, when the Bee-grub was eating her store of honey, things would surely have gone badly with it. The victim, feeling herself bled to death by that ravenous kiss, would have protested with much wriggling of body and grinding of mandibles. The intruder would have perished. But at the hour chosen so wisely by it all danger is over. Enclosed in her silken sheath, the larva is in the torpid state that precedes her transformation into a Bee. Her condition is not death, but neither is it life. So there is no sign of irritation when I stir her with a needle, nor when the Anthrax-grub attacks her.