Note 4 — Chapter XI · THE COMMON WASP (continued)

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.4 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.