In the light of the above cases, that of the cuckoo-bees does not seem so very wonderful, since both the species are bees, and all or most of the members of any group or family of animals as a rule bear some resemblance to one another, since they descend from a common and not very remote ancestor. Many flies, however, have almost as close a resemblance to various bees and wasps, whilst one of the latter is even the model for a species of cricket, which would otherwise fall a victim to it and others of its family. There is a beetle, too, so like a wasp, not only in its appearance, but in the way in which it runs about and moves its antennæ, that anyone almost would be taken in. Whether, under this disguise, it enters wasps’ nests and preys upon the larvæ, as the bee-like _Volucella_ flies enter the nests of the humble-bees they imitate, I do not know, nor, I think, does anyone, but this might very well be the case. These flies, however, now I come to think of it, do not really injure the bees. It used to be the idea that they did, but lately it has been discovered that they are only scavengers, feeding on all the waste products of their hosts, and even on their dead bodies should such opportunities arise.[101] The humble-bees, on their part, seem to appreciate these services, though we are not entitled to say that they admit the flies into their nests on this account, since they probably do so owing to their likeness to themselves. Of the walking-stick insects, which are hardly to be distinguished, even with close attention, from the grass or twigs on which they cling, everyone has heard or read, and the caterpillars, common enough in England, which remain motionless, projecting like a twig from its stem, and looking just the same as one, are almost as good instances of unconscious deception. But neither these caterpillars, nor any of the other insects that have been mentioned, do anything, except through the attitudes they assume, to produce their wonderful disguises. They have nothing to do with the cutting out of the material. They do not dress up for the part themselves. That, however, is what some caterpillars do. There is one, for instance, in Borneo, that has a number of spines arranged in pairs down its back, and on each of these spines it fixes several little buds of the plant on which it is feeding, such buds, and not the leaves of the plant, being the actual food it eats. Consequently the caterpillar, which is quite a small one, looks like a spray of tiny buds itself, and can hardly, by possibility, be noticed amidst its flowery chaplet. The buds are not impaled on the spines, as might be supposed, but are attached to them with silk, which the caterpillar weaves for the purpose, and the whole process of the thing has been observed by the gentleman who gives the account, and who is no less competent a person than the curator of the Sarawak Museum. This is what he says: “A bud would be shorn off with the mandibles, then held in the