In many hymenoptera only the female carries the sword, as in the case of the gilded wasp, gold-striped over blue or red, who can project a long needle from her abdomen; the female philanthe, who is carnivorous, while the puerile unarmed male lives upon flower-pollen. Not disdaining this natural dessert, the female philanthe will attack the nectar-loaded bee with her great dart, stab him and pump out his crop. One may see the ferocious small animal knead the dead bee for half an hour, squeeze him like a lemon, drink him out like a gourd. Charming and candid habits of these winged topazes whirring among the flowers! Fabre has excused this sadique gourmandizing: the philanthe kills bees in order to feed her larvæ, who have, however, so great a repugnance for honey that they die upon contact with it; it is therefore out of sheer maternal devotion that she intoxicates herself with this poison! All things are, in nature, possible. But it might not be unreasonable to say that if the larvæ of the philanthe hate honey, it is because their greatly honey-loving mother has never allowed them a drop of it.
One of the rare cases of hymenoptera where the female appears inferior to the male is the mutille or ant-spider. The male is larger, has wings and lives on flowers. The female is apteral, but provided with a noisy apparatus for attracting the male's attention. The male of the cynips of the oak-apple, the terminal cynips, has a blond body with large diaphanous wings, the brown and black female is wingless. The male yellow cimbex slender, and brown with a spot of yellow, is so different from the round female with yellow belly and black head, that they were long thought of different species.
Ants like all social hymenoptera are, as one knows, divided into three sexes, winged males and females and wingless neuters. Fecundation takes place in the air; the lovers fly up, join, fall enlocked, a golden cloud which the death of the males disperses, while the females, losing their wings, re-enter the house for egg-laying. The workers or neuters are generally smaller, as noticeably in the great red wood-ants, who dig their shelters in stumps. White ants or termites[1] show very accentuated dimorphism; the female or queen having a head almost as large as that of a bee, a belly the thickness of one's finger, long in proportion, and growing to be fifteen times as large as the rest of her body. This sexual tub lays continuously without any let-up at the speed of an egg per second. The male, as in Baudelaire's vision of the giantess, lives in the shadow of this formidable mountain of female power and luxury. Among the termites there is not a fourth sex but a fourth way of being sexless. There are soldiers as well as workers, the soldiers having powerful mandibles mounted on enormous heads. All the termite customs are extraordinary, and their conic nests reach a height having a relation to them that a house five or six hundred metres high would have to us.