The host of devourers has hastened up, receiving only a little at first, but foreseeing great junketings in the future. By the end of November, the bottom of the crypt is a swarming hostelry, dominated numerically by the grubs of certain Flies, those undertakers of the Wasps’-nests. I gather great numbers of the larvæ of the Volucella, who deserves a chapter to herself, by reason of her fame. I find here, poking its tapering head into the bellies of the corpses, a naked, white, pointed maggot, smaller than that of the Luciliæ. [70] It works promiscuously with a second, even smaller grub, brown and clad in a prickly smock. I come upon a dwarf which, looping and unlooping, wriggles about like the Cheese-mites. All of them are dissecting, dismembering and disembowelling with so much zeal that, when February arrives, they have not yet had time to shrink into pupæ. It is so pleasant here, sheltered against the inclemencies of the weather, in the snug basement, with provisions in abundance! Why hurry? These smug eaters expect to consume the heap of victuals before hardening their skin into a barrel. They linger so long over their banquet that I forget to secure them for my rearing-phials; and I can say no more about their history. In the charnel-houses of Moles and Snakes in my aerial retting-vats, [71] I used to note, from time to time, the arrival of the largest of our Staphylini, [72] S. maxillosus, who, in passing, would make a brief stay under the putrid mass and then proceed to pursue her business elsewhere. The Wasps’ charnel-house similarly has short-winged Beetles among its habitual visitors. I often come upon Quedius fulgidas, Fab., there, the one with the red wing-cases. But this time it is not a temporary hostelry; it is a family establishment, for the adult Staphylinus is accompanied by her larva. I also find Wood-lice and Millipedes, of the genus Polydesma, both inferior trenchermen, feeding probably on the humours oozing from the dead. Let us also mention one of the outstanding insect-eaters, the tiniest of our mammals, the Shrew, who is smaller than the Common Mouse. At the time of the final catastrophe, when sickness has calmed the aggressive fury of the Wasps, the visitor with the pointed muzzle steals into the nest. Exploited by a pair of Shrew-mice, the dying crowd is soon reduced to a heap of remnants which the maggots end by clearing out. The ruins themselves will perish. A caterpillar that develops later into a mean-looking, whitish Moth; a Cryptophagus, a tiny reddish Beetle; and a larva of one of the Dermestes [73] (Attagenus pellio), clad in scaly gold velvet, gnaw the floors of the stages and crumble the whole dwelling. A few pinches of dust, a few shreds of brown paper are all that remains, by the return of spring, of the Vespian city and its thirty thousand inhabitants. CHAPTER XII THE VOLUCELLA