“The Bees,” he said, “throw out their dead grubs. The front of the stand is strewn with them in the mornings; and the Nightingales come and collect them for themselves and their families. They are very fond of them.” This time I had solved the puzzle. Delicious food, abundant and fresh each day, had brought the songsters together. Contrary to their habit, numbers of Nightingales are living on friendly terms in a cluster of bushes, in order to be near the hives and to have a larger share in the morning distribution of plump dainties. In the same way, the Nightingale and his gastronomical rivals would haunt the neighbourhood of the Wasps’-nests, if the dead grubs were cast out on the surface of the soil; but these delicacies fall inside the burrow and no little bird would dare to enter the murky cave, even if the entrance were not too small to admit it. Other consumers are needed here, small in size and great in daring; the Fly is called for and her maggot, the king of the departed. What the Greenbottles, Bluebottles and Flesh-flies [74] do in the open air, at the expense of every kind of corpse, other Flies, narrowing their province, do underground at the Wasps’ expense. Let us turn our attention, in September, to the wrapper of a Wasps’-nest. On the outer surface and there alone, this wrapper is strewn with a multitude of big, white, oval dots, firmly fixed to the brown paper and measuring roughly one-tenth of an inch long by one-sixteenth of an inch wide. Flat below, convex above and of a lustrous white, these dots resemble very neat drops from a tallow candle. Lastly, their backs are streaked with faint transversal lines, an elegant detail perceptible only with the lens. These curious objects are scattered all over the surface of the wrapper, sometimes at a distance from one another, sometimes gathered into more or less dense groups. They are the eggs of the Volucella, or Bumble-bee Fly (V. zonaria, Poda). Also stuck to the brown paper of the outer envelope and mixed up with the Volucella’s are a large number of other eggs, chalk-white, spear-shaped and ridged lengthwise with seven or eight thin ribs, after the manner of the seeds of certain Umbelliferæ. The finishing touch to their delicate beauty is the fine stippling all over the surface. They are smaller by half than the others. I have seen grubs come out of them which might easily be the earliest stage of some pointed maggots which I have already noticed in the burrows. My attempts to rear them failed; and I am not able to say to which Fly these eggs belong. Enough for us to note the nameless one in passing. There are plenty of others, which we must make up our minds to leave unlabelled, in view of the jumbled crowd of feasters in the ruined Wasps’-nest. We will concern ourselves only with the most remarkable, in the front rank of which stands the Volucella.