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.

CHAPTER 14. THE HALICTI: PARTHENOGENESIS.

The Halictus opens up another question, connected with one of life's
obscurest problems. Let us go back five-and-twenty years. I am living at
Orange. My house stands alone among the fields. On the other side of
the wall enclosing our yard, which faces due south, is a narrow path
overgrown with couch-grass. The sun beats full upon it; and the glare
reflected from the whitewash of the wall turns it into a little tropical
corner, shut off from the rude gusts of the north-west wind.

Here the Cats come to take their afternoon nap, with their eyes
half-closed; here the children come, with Bull, the House-dog; here
also come the haymakers, at the hottest time of the day, to sit and take
their meal and whet their scythes in the shade of the plane-tree; here
the women pass up and down with their rakes, after the hay-harvest, to
glean what they can on the niggardly carpet of the shorn meadow. It is
therefore a very much frequented footpath, were it only because of the
coming and going of our household: a thoroughfare ill-suited, one would
think, to the peaceful operations of a Bee; and nevertheless it is such
a very warm and sheltered spot and the soil is so favourable that every
year I see the Cylindrical Halictus (H. cylindricus, FAB.)