When struck in the neck, the Bee succumbs at once.  It was the lightning death which I witnessed on the threshold of the burrows.  When struck in the abdomen and then placed in a large bottle that leaves its movements free, the insect seems, at first, to have suffered no serious injury.  It flutters about and buzzes.  But half an hour has not elapsed before death is imminent.  The insect lies motionless upon its back or side.  At most, a few movements of the legs, a slight pulsation of the belly, continuing till the morrow, proclaim that life has not yet entirely departed.  Then everything ceases:  the Carpenter-bee is a corpse.

The importance of this experiment compels our attention.  When stung in the neck, the powerful Bee dies on the spot; and the Spider has not to fear the dangers of a desperate struggle.  Stung elsewhere, in the abdomen, the insect is capable, for nearly half an hour, of making use of its dart, its mandibles, its legs; and woe to the Lycosa whom the stiletto reaches.  I have seen some who, stabbed in the mouth while biting close to the sting, died of the wound within the twenty-four hours.  That dangerous prey, therefore, requires instantaneous death, produced by the injury to the nerve-centres of the neck; otherwise, the hunter’s life would often be in jeopardy.

The Grasshopper order supplied me with a second series of victims:  Green Grasshoppers as long as one’s finger, large-headed Locusts, Ephippigerae. {12} The same result follows when these are bitten in the neck:  lightning death.  When injured elsewhere, notably in the abdomen, the subject of the experiment resists for some time.  I have seen a Grasshopper, bitten in the belly, cling firmly for fifteen hours to the smooth, upright wall of the glass bell that constituted his prison.  At last, he dropped off and died.  Where the Bee, that delicate organism, succumbs in less than half an hour, the Grasshopper, coarse ruminant that he is, resists for a whole day.  Put aside these differences, caused by unequal degrees of organic sensitiveness, and we sum up as follows:  when bitten by the Tarantula in the neck, an insect, chosen from among the largest, dies on the spot; when bitten elsewhere, it perishes also, but after a lapse of time which varies considerably in the different entomological orders.

This explains the long hesitation of the Tarantula, so wearisome to the experimenter when he presents to her, at the entrance to the burrow, a rich, but dangerous prey.  The majority refuse to fling themselves upon the Carpenter-bee.  The fact is that a quarry of this kind cannot be seized recklessly:  the huntress who missed her stroke by biting at random would do so at the risk of her life.  The nape of the neck alone possesses the desired vulnerability.  The adversary must be nipped there and no elsewhere.  Not to floor her at once would mean to irritate her and make her more dangerous than ever.  The Spider is well aware of this.  In the safe shelter of