MY WORK AND MY WORKSHOP 1
CHAPTER II
THE SACRED BEETLE 11
CHAPTER III
THE CICADA 25
CHAPTER IV
THE PRAYING MANTIS 40
CHAPTER V
THE GLOW-WORM 54
CHAPTER VI
A MASON-WASP 69
CHAPTER VII
THE PSYCHES 89
CHAPTER VIII
THE SELF-DENIAL OF THE SPANISH COPRIS 109
CHAPTER IX
TWO STRANGE GRASSHOPPERS 121
CHAPTER X
COMMON WASPS 138
CHAPTER XI
THE ADVENTURES OF A GRUB 157
CHAPTER XII
THE CRICKET 175
CHAPTER XIII
THE SISYPHUS 198
CHAPTER XIV
THE CAPRICORN 209
CHAPTER XV
LOCUSTS 227
CHAPTER XVI
THE ANTHRAX FLY 249
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE SACRED BEETLE Frontispiece
Sometimes the Scarab seems to enter into partnership with
a friend
THE CICADA FACING PAGE
In July, when most of the insects in my sunny country are
parched with thirst, the Cicada remains perfectly cheerful 26
THE PRAYING MANTIS
A long time ago, in the days of ancient Greece, this insect
was named Mantis, or the Prophet 42
PELOPÆUS SPIRIFEX
When finished the work is amber-yellow, and rather reminds
one of the outer skin of an onion 80
THE PSYCHES
This is the secret of the walking bundle of sticks. It is a
Faggot Caterpillar, belonging to the group known as the Psyches 90
THE SPANISH COPRIS
The burrow is almost filled by three or four ovoid nests,
standing one against the other, with the pointed end upwards 116
THE WHITE-FACED DECTICUS
The Greek word dectikos means biting, fond of biting. The
Decticus is well named. It is eminently an insect given
to biting 130
COMMON WASPS
The wasp’s nest is made of a thin, flexible material like
brown paper, formed of particles of wood 144
THE FIELD CRICKET
Here is one of the humblest of creatures able to lodge himself
to perfection. He has a home; he has a peaceful retreat, the
first condition of comfort 180
THE SISYPHUS
The mother harnesses herself in the place of honour, in front.
The father pushes behind in the reverse position, head
downwards 204
ITALIAN LOCUSTS
“I have buried underground,” she says, “the treasure of
the future” 238
THE ANTHRAX FLY
Her delicate suit of downy velvet, from which you take the
bloom by merely breathing on it, could not withstand the
contact of rough tunnels 258
FABRE’S BOOK OF INSECTS
CHAPTER I
MY WORK AND MY WORKSHOP
We all have our own talents, our special gifts. Sometimes these gifts
seem to come to us from our forefathers, but more often it is difficult
to trace their origin.
A goatherd, perhaps, amuses himself by counting little pebbles and
doing sums with them. He becomes an astoundingly quick reckoner, and in
the end is a professor of mathematics. Another boy, at an age when most
of us care only for play, leaves his schoolfellows at their games and
listens to the imaginary sounds of an organ, a secret concert heard by
him alone. He has a genius for music. A third—so small, perhaps, that
he cannot eat his bread and jam without smearing his face—takes a keen
delight in fashioning clay into little figures that are amazingly
lifelike. If he be fortunate he will some day be a famous sculptor.
To talk about oneself is hateful, I know, but perhaps I may be allowed
to do so for a moment, in order to introduce myself and my studies.
From my earliest childhood I have felt drawn towards the things of
Nature. It would be ridiculous to suppose that this gift, this love of
observing plants and insects, was inherited from my ancestors, who were
uneducated people of the soil and observed little but their own cows
and sheep. Of my four grandparents only one ever opened a book, and
even he was very uncertain about his spelling. Nor do I owe anything to
a scientific training. Without masters, without guides, often without
books, I have gone forward with one aim always before me: to add a few
pages to the history of insects.
As I look back—so many years back!—I can see myself as a tiny boy,
extremely proud of my first braces and of my attempts to learn the
alphabet. And very well I remember the delight of finding my first
bird’s nest and gathering my first mushroom.
One day I was climbing a hill. At the top of it was a row of trees that
had long interested me very much. From the little window at home I
could see them against the sky, tossing before the wind or writhing
madly in the snow, and I wished to have a closer view of them. It was a
long climb—ever so long; and my legs were very short. I clambered up
slowly and tediously, for the grassy slope was as steep as a roof.
Suddenly, at my feet, a lovely bird flew out from its hiding-place
under a big stone. In a moment I had found the nest, which was made of
hair and fine straw, and had six eggs laid side by side in it. The eggs
were a magnificent azure blue, very bright. This was the first nest I
ever found, the first of the many joys which the birds were to bring
me. Overpowered with pleasure, I lay down on the grass and stared at
it.
Meanwhile the mother-bird was flying about uneasily from stone to
stone, crying ”Tack! Tack!” in a voice of the greatest anxiety. I was
too small to understand what she was suffering. I made a plan worthy of
a little beast of prey. I would carry away just one of the pretty blue
eggs as a trophy, and then, in a fortnight, I would come back and take
the tiny birds before they could fly away. Fortunately, as I walked
carefully home, carrying my blue egg on a bed of moss, I met the
priest.
“Ah!” said he. “A Saxicola’s egg! Where did you get it?”
I told him the whole story. “I shall go back for the others,” I said,
“when the young birds have got their quill-feathers.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t do that!” cried the priest.
“You mustn’t be so cruel as to rob the poor mother of all her little
birds. Be a good boy, now, and promise not to touch the nest.”
From this conversation I learnt two things: first, that robbing birds’
nests is cruel and, secondly, that birds and beasts have names just
like ourselves.
“What are the names of all my friends in the woods and meadows?” I
asked myself. “And what does Saxicola mean?” Years later I learnt that
Saxicola means an inhabitant of the rocks. My bird with the blue eggs
was a Stone-chat.
Below our village there ran a little brook, and beyond the brook was a
spinney of beeches with smooth, straight trunks, like pillars. The
ground was padded with moss. It was in this spinney that I picked my
first mushroom, which looked, when I caught sight of it, like an egg
dropped on the moss by some wandering hen. There were many others
there, of different sizes, forms, and colours. Some were shaped like
bells, some like extinguishers, some like cups: some were broken, and
were weeping tears of milk: some became blue when I trod on them.
Others, the most curious of all, were like pears with a round hole at
the top—a sort of chimney whence a whiff of smoke escaped when I
prodded their under-side with my finger. I filled my pockets with
these, and made them smoke at my leisure, till at last they were
reduced to a kind of tinder.
Many a time I returned to that delightful spinney, and learnt my first
lessons in mushroom-lore in the company of the Crows. My collections, I
need hardly say, were not admitted to the house.
In this way—by observing Nature and making experiments—nearly all my
lessons have been learnt: all except two, in fact. I have received from
others two lessons of a scientific character, and two only, in the
whole course of my life: one in anatomy and one in chemistry.
I owe the first to the learned naturalist Moquin-Tandon, who showed me
how to explore the interior of a Snail in a plate filled with water.
The lesson was short and fruitful. [1]
My first introduction to chemistry was less fortunate. It ended in the
bursting of a glass vessel, with the result that most of my
fellow-pupils were hurt, one of them nearly lost his sight, the
lecturer’s clothes were burnt to pieces, and the wall of the
lecture-room was splashed with stains. Later on, when I returned to
that room, no longer as a pupil but as a master, the splashes were
still there. On that occasion I learnt one thing at least. Ever after,
when I made experiments of that kind, I kept my pupils at a distance.
It has always been my great desire to have a laboratory in the open
fields—not an easy thing to obtain when one lives in a state of
constant anxiety about one’s daily bread. For forty years it was my
dream to own a little bit of land, fenced in for the sake of privacy: a
desolate, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, overgrown with thistles and
much beloved by Wasps and Bees. Here, without fear of interruption, I
might question the Hunting-wasps and others of my friends in that
difficult language which consists of experiments and observations.
Here, without the long expeditions and rambles that use up my time and
strength, I might watch my insects at every hour of the day.
And then, at last, my wish was fulfilled. I obtained a bit of land in
the solitude of a little village. It was a harmas, which is the name we
give in this part of Provence to an untilled, pebbly expanse where
hardly any plant but thyme can grow. It is too poor to be worth the
trouble of ploughing, but the sheep pass there in spring, when it has
chanced to rain and a little grass grows up.
My own particular harmas, however, had a small quantity of red earth
mixed with the stones, and had been roughly cultivated. I was told that
vines once grew here, and I was sorry, for the original vegetation had
been driven out by the three-pronged fork. There was no thyme left, nor
lavender, nor a single clump of the dwarf oak. As thyme and lavender
might be useful to me as a hunting-ground for Bees and Wasps, I was
obliged to plant them again.
There were plenty of weeds: couch-grass, and prickly centauries, and
the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, with its spreading orange flowers and
spikes strong as nails. Above it towered the Illyrian cotton-thistle,
whose straight and solitary stalk grows sometimes to the height of six
feet and ends in large pink tufts. There were smaller thistles too, so
well armed that the plant-collector can hardly tell where to grasp
them, and spiky knapweeds, and in among them, in long lines provided
with hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creeping along the ground.
If you had visited this prickly thicket without wearing high boots, you
would have paid dearly for your rashness!
Such was the Eden that I won by forty years of desperate struggle.
This curious, barren Paradise of mine is the happy hunting-ground of
countless Bees and Wasps. Never have I seen so large a population of
insects at a single spot. All the trades have made it their centre.
Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay,
cotton-weavers, leaf-cutters, architects in pasteboard, plasterers
mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground
galleries, workers in gold-beaters’ skin, and many more.
See—here is a Tailor-bee. She scrapes the cobwebby stalk of the
yellow-flowered centaury, and gathers a ball of wadding which she
carries off proudly with her mandibles or jaws. She will turn it,
underground, into cotton satchels to hold the store of honey and the
eggs. And here are the Leaf-cutting Bees, carrying their black, white,
or blood-red reaping brushes under their bodies. They will visit the
neighbouring shrubs, and there cut from the leaves oval pieces in which
to wrap their harvest. Here too are the black, velvet-clad Mason-bees,
who work with cement and gravel. We could easily find specimens of
their masonry on the stones in the harmas. Next comes a kind of Wild
Bee who stacks her cells in the winding staircase of an empty
snail-shell; and another who lodges her grubs in the pith of a dry
bramble-stalk; and a third who uses the channel of a cut reed; and a
fourth who lives rent-free in the vacant galleries of some Mason-bee.
There are also Bees with horns, and Bees with brushes on their
hind-legs, to be used for reaping.
While the walls of my harmas were being built some great heaps of
stones and mounds of sand were scattered here and there by the
builders, and were soon occupied by a variety of inhabitants. The
Mason-bees chose the chinks between the stones for their
sleeping-place. The powerful Eyed Lizard, who, when hard pressed,
attacks both man and dog, selected a cave in which to lie in wait for
the passing Scarab, or Sacred Beetle. The Black-eared Chat, who looks
like a Dominican monk in his white-and-black raiment, sat on the top
stone singing his brief song. His nest, with the sky-blue eggs, must
have been somewhere in the heap. When the stones were moved the little
Dominican moved too. I regret him: he would have been a charming
neighbour. The Eyed Lizard I do not regret at all.
The sand-heaps sheltered a colony of Digger-wasps and Hunting-wasps,
who were, to my sorrow, turned out at last by the builders. But still
there are hunters left: some who flutter about in search of
Caterpillars, and one very large kind of Wasp who actually has the
courage to hunt the Tarantula. Many of these mighty Spiders have their
burrows in the harmas, and you can see their eyes gleaming at the
bottom of the den like little diamonds. On hot summer afternoons you
may also see Amazon-ants, who leave their barracks in long battalions
and march far afield to hunt for slaves.
Nor are these all. The shrubs about the house are full of birds,
Warblers and Greenfinches, Sparrows and Owls; while the pond is so
popular with the Frogs that in May it becomes a deafening orchestra.
And boldest of all, the Wasp has taken possession of the house itself.
On my doorway lives the White-banded Sphex: when I go indoors I must be
careful not to tread upon her as she carries on her work of mining.
Just within a closed window a kind of Mason-wasp has made her
earth-built nest upon the freestone wall. To enter her home she uses a
little hole left by accident in the shutters. On the mouldings of the
Venetian blinds a few stray Mason-bees build their cells. The Common
Wasp and the Solitary Wasp visit me at dinner. The object of their
visit, apparently, is to see if my grapes are ripe.
Such are my companions. My dear beasts, my friends of former days and
other more recent acquaintances, are all here, hunting, and building,
and feeding their families. And if I wish for change the mountain is
close to me, with its tangle of arbutus, and rock-roses, and heather,
where Wasps and Bees delight to gather. And that is why I deserted the
town for the village, and came to Sérignan to weed my turnips and water
my lettuces.