In the sandy banks and stony fields of Provence, Jean-Henri Fabre watches solitary wasps at work: the Cerceris that stocks its burrow with jewel-beetles, the Yellow-winged Sphex that subdues crickets with three precise stings. He digs up their nests, rears their larvae and tests their instincts with patient experiments, asking how an insect knows exactly where to strike.
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’s translation opens Fabre’s wasp essays, a model of close observation written with a storyteller’s warmth. Download the free EPUB.