第91章 THE HALICTI: THE PORTRESS.(6)

This propensity is pretty frequent among peace-lovers, who, needing little nourishment, have no cause to fear competition. The others, the big eaters, take possession of estates, of hunting-grounds from which their fellows are excluded. Ask a Wolf his opinion of a brother Wolf poaching on his preserves. Man himself, the chief of consumers, makes for himself frontiers armed with artillery; he sets up posts at the foot of which one says to the other:

'Here's my side, there's yours. That's enough: now we'll pepper each other.'

And the rattle of the latest explosives ends the colloquy.

Happy are the peace-lovers. What do they gain by their mustering?

With them it is not a defensive system, a concerted effort to ward off the common foe. The Halictus does not care about her neighbour's affairs. She does not visit another's burrow; she does not allow others to visit hers. She has her tribulations, which she endures alone; she is indifferent to the tribulations of her kind. She stands aloof from the strife of her fellows. Let each mind her own business and leave things at that.

But company has its attractions. He lives twice who watches the life of others. Individual activity gains by the sight of the general activity; the animation of each one derives fresh warmth from the fire of the universal animation. To see one's neighbours at work stimulates one's rivalry. And work is the great delight, the real satisfaction that gives some value to life. The Halictus knows this well and assembles in her numbers that she may work all the better.

Sometimes she assembles in such multitudes and over such extents of ground as to suggest our own colossal swarms. Babylon and Memphis, Rome and Carthage, London and Paris, those frantic hives, occur to our mind if we can manage to forget comparative dimensions and see a Cyclopean pile in a pinch of earth.

It was in February. The almond-tree was in blossom. A sudden rush of sap had given the tree new life; its boughs, all black and desolate, seemingly dead, were becoming a glorious dome of snowy satin. I have always loved this magic of the awakening spring, this smile of the first flowers against the gloomy bareness of the bark.

And so I was walking across the fields, gazing at the almond-trees'

carnival. Others were before me. An Osmia in a black velvet bodice and a red woollen skirt, the Horned Osmia, was visiting the flowers, dipping into each pink eye in search of a honeyed tear. A very small and very modestly-dressed Halictus, much busier and in far greater numbers, was flitting silently from blossom to blossom. Official science calls her Halictus malachurus, K. The pretty little Bee's godfather strikes me as ill-inspired. What has malachurus, calling attention to the softness of the rump, to do in this connection? The name of Early Halictus would better describe the almond-tree's little visitor.

None of the melliferous clan, in my neighbourhood at least, is stirring as early as she is. She digs her burrows in February, an inclement month, subject to sudden returns of frost. When none as yet, even among her near kinswomen, dares to sally forth from winter-quarters, she pluckily goes to work, shine the sun ever so little.

Like the Zebra Halictus, she has two generations a year, one in spring and one in summer; like her, too, she settles by preference in the hard ruts of the country roads.

Her mole-hills, those humble mounds any two of which would go easily into a Hen's egg, rise innumerous in my path, the path by the almond-trees which is the happy hunting-ground of my curiosity to-day. This path is a ribbon of road three paces wide, worn into ruts by the Mule's hoofs and the wheels of the farm-carts. A coppice of holm-oaks shelters it from the north wind. In this Eden with its well-caked soil, its warmth and quiet, the little Halictus has multiplied her mole-hills to such a degree that I cannot take a step without crushing some of them. The accident is not serious: the miner, safe underground, will be able to scramble up the crumbling sides of the mine and repair the threshold of the trampled home.

I make a point of measuring the density of the population. I count from forty to sixty mole-hills on a surface of one square yard. The encampment is three paces wide and stretches over nearly three-quarters of a mile. How many Halicti are there in this Babylon? I do not venture to make the calculation.

Speaking of the Zebra Halictus, I used the words hamlet, village, township; and the expressions were appropriate. Here the term city hardly meets the case. And what reason can we allege for these innumerable clusters? I can see but one: the charm of living together, which is the origin of society. Like mingles with like, without the rendering of any mutual service; and this is enough to summon the Early Halictus to the same way-side, even as the Herring and the Sardine assemble in the same waters.