The father goes out and selects a pellet whose length is greater than the diameter of the pit. He conveys it to the mouth, either backwards, by dragging it with his fore-feet, or straight ahead, by rolling it with little thrusts of his clypeus. He reaches the edge of the hole. Will he fling the lump down the precipice with one last push? Not at all: he has plans that are incompatible with a violent fall. He enters, clasping the pellet with his legs and taking care to insert it by one end. On reaching a certain distance from the bottom, he has only to slant the piece slightly to make it find a support at its two ends against the walls of the shaft: this because of the greater length of its main axis. He thus obtains a sort of temporary flooring able to bear the load of two or three pellets. The whole forms the workshop in which the father will perform his task without disturbing the mother, who is herself engaged below. It is the mill whence will be lowered the meal for making the cakes. The miller is well-equipped for his work. Look at his trident. On the solid foundation of the corselet stand three sharp spears, the two outer ones long, the middle one short, all three pointing forwards. What purpose does this weapon serve? At first sight, one would take it for a mere masculine decoration, the corporation of Dung-beetles boasting many such, of various forms. Well, it is something more than an ornament: the Minotaur turns his gaud into a tool. The three points of unequal length describe a concave arc, wide enough to admit a spherical dropping. Standing on his incomplete and quaking floor, which demands the employment of his four hind-legs, propped against the walls of the shaft, how will the Beetle manage to keep the slippery pellet in position and break it up? Let us watch him at work. Stooping a little, he drives his fork into the piece, which is thenceforth rendered stationary, for it is held in the crescent-shaped jaws of the implement. The fore-legs are free; with their toothed shanks they can saw the morsel, shred it and reduce it to fragments which gradually fall through the gaps in the flooring and reach the mother below. The substance which the miller shoots down is not a flour passed through the bolting-sieve, but rather a coarse meal, a mixture of pulverized remnants and of pieces hardly ground at all. Incomplete though it be, this preliminary grinding will be of the greatest assistance to the mother in her tedious job of bread-making: it will shorten the work and allow the best and the second best to be separated forthwith. When everything on the upper story, including the floor itself, is ground to powder, the horned miller returns to the open air, gathers a fresh harvest and starts his work of crumbling anew entirely at his leisure.