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.