The prey is dismembered now on the spot where captured, now on the way, now at the nest. The wings, which possess no nutritive value, are cut off and rejected; the legs, which are poor in juices, are also sometimes disdained. There remains a mutilated corpse, head, thorax, abdomen, united or separated, which the Wasp chews and rechews to reduce it to the pap beloved of the larvæ. I have tried to take the place of the nurses in this method of rearing grubs on Fly-soup. The subject of my experiment was a nest of Polistes gallica, the Wasp who fastens her little rosette of brown-paper cells to the roots of a shrub. My kitchen-table was a flat piece of marble on which I crushed the Fly-pap after cleaning the heads of game, that is to say, after removing the parts that were too tough, the wings and legs; lastly, the feeding-spoon was a fine straw, at the tip of which the dish was served, from cell to cell, to each nurseling, which opened its mandibles just as the young birds in the nest might do. I used to go to work in exactly the same way and succeeded no better when bringing up broods of Sparrows, that joy of my childhood. All went well as long as my patience did not fail me, tried as it was by the cares of so finikin and absorbing an education. The obscurity of the enigma gives way to the full light of truth thanks to the following observation, made with all the deliberateness which strict precision calls for. In the early days of October, two large clumps of asters in blossom outside the door of my study became the meeting-place of a host of insects, among which the Hive-bee and an Eristalis-fly (Eristalis tenax) predominate. A gentle murmur rose from them, like that of which Virgil sings: Sæpe levi somnum suadebit inire susurro. [29] But, where the poet finds but an incitement to the delights of sleep, the naturalist beholds a subject for study: all this small folk making holiday on the last flowers of the year will perhaps furnish him with some fresh data. Behold me then on observation duty before the two clumps with their thousands of lilac petals. The air is absolutely still, the sun blazing, the atmosphere heavy: signs of an approaching storm, but conditions eminently favourable to the work of the Hymenoptera, who seem to foresee to-morrow’s rain and redouble their activity to improve the opportunity. And so the Bees plunder eagerly, while the Eristales fly clumsily from flower to flower. At times, the peaceable multitude, filling its crop with nectar, is disturbed by the sudden invasion of the Wasp, a ravening insect attracted hither by prey, not honey.