Another and a very significant detail is supplied by a cage in which I several times tried to rear the insect. As the bed of soil, some eighteen inches thick, was not deep enough, the prisoners absolutely refused to build their nests in it. Apart from this, the other, usual operations were pursued according to rule. Well, from the end of April onwards, the males ascend to the surface, one at a time. For a couple of days they wander about the trellis-work, anxious to get away. At last they tumble off, lie on their backs and slowly give up the ghost. Age has killed them. In the first week of June, I dig up the soil in the cage from top to bottom. Of the fifteen males who were there at the beginning, hardly one remains. All have died; all the females survive. The harsh law is therefore inevitable. After helping with his hod in the lengthy task of sinking the shaft, after amassing suitable provisions and grinding the meal, the industrious trident-bearer goes away to die far from home. CHAPTER VI MINOTAURUS TYPHŒUS: FURTHER OBSERVATIONS The bamboo tripod, so alien in its arrangement to the Minotaur’s habits, might well have been the cause, in part, of the father’s premature decease. In the glass tube, only one cylindrical cake alone was prepared. Evidently this was not enough. Two at least are needed to maintain the species in the actual state; more would be needed, as many as possible, for increased prosperity. But in my apparatus there is no room, unless the food-cylinders are superimposed and piled in columns, a mistake which the mother would never commit. Superimposed stories would afterwards make the emergence of the offspring difficult. In their eagerness to reach the light, the oldest, grown sufficiently mature and occupying the foot of the column, would topple over and lacerate the late arrivals, who are not yet ready to occupy the top. For a quiet, exodus it is important that the shaft should be free from one end to the other. The several cavities must therefore be grouped side by side and communicate, each by a lateral passage, with the common ascension-shaft. Long ago, the Bison Ortis [42] showed us his preserves, the rations of so many grubs, arranged near the bottom of the burrow. A short passage connected each of the chambers with the vertical shaft. The cells were all grouped on one landing. Probably the Minotaur adopts a similar system. Indeed, when I go digging in the fields, a little late in the season, when the father is already dead, my trowel unearths a second chamber, with an egg and provisions, at some distance from the main chamber, which itself contains an egg and is duly victualled. Another excavation gives me two eccentric cells. The arrangement is the same in each case, in the blind alley of the burrow and in its annexes: at the base, in the sand, is an egg; above it are the victuals, packed into a column.