It is most often during the months of August and September, those happy months of the summer holidays, that I have visited the banks inhabited by the Anthophora. At this period all is silent near the nests; the work has long been completed; and numbers of Spiders' webs line the crevices or plunge their silken tubes into the Bee's corridors. Let us not, however, hastily abandon the city once so populous, so full of life and bustle and now deserted. A few inches below the surface, thousands of larvae and nymphs, imprisoned in their cells of clay, are resting until the coming spring. Might not such a succulent prey as these larvae, paralysed and incapable of defence, tempt certain parasites who are industrious enough to attain them? Here indeed are some Flies clad in a dismal livery, half-black, half-white, a species of Anthrax (_A. sinuata_),[3] flying indolently from gallery to gallery, doubtless with the object of laying their eggs there; and here are others, more numerous, whose mission is fulfilled and who, having died in harness, are hanging dry and shrivelled in the Spiders' webs. Elsewhere the entire surface of a perpendicular bank is hung with the dried corpses of a Beetle (_Sitaris humeralis_), slung, like the Flies, in the silken meshes of the Spiders. Among these corpses some male Sitares circle, busy, amorous, heedless of death, mating with the first female that passes within reach, while the fertilized females thrust their bulky abdomens into the opening of a gallery and disappear into it backwards. It is impossible to mistake the situation: some grave interest attracts to this spot these two insects, which, within a few days, make their appearance, mate, lay their eggs and die at the very doors of the Anthophora's dwellings. [Footnote 3: Cf. _The Life of the Fly_, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chaps. ii. and iv.--_Translator's Note_.]