means. The Bee does not know what that portion is. There
is nothing to tell the materfamilias; and yet, at her first attempt, she
fills the honey-pot to the requisite depth. True, in her childhood she
received a similar ration, but she consumed it in the darkness of
a cell; and besides, as a grub, she was blind. Sight was not her
informant: it did not tell her the quantity of the provisions. Did
memory, the memory of the stomach that once digested them? But digestion
took place a year ago; and since that distant epoch, the nurseling, now
an adult insect, has changed its shape, its dwelling, its mode of
life. It was a grub; it is a Bee. Does the actual insect remember that
childhood's meal? No more than we remember the sups of milk drawn from
our mother's breast. The Bee, therefore, knows nothing of the quantity
of provisions needed by her larva, whether from memory, from example
or from acquired experience. Then what guides her when she makes her
estimate with such precision? Judgment and sight would leave the mother
greatly perplexed, liable to provide too much or not enough. To instruct
her beyond the possibility of a mistake demands a special tendency,
an unconscious impulse, an instinct, an inward voice that dictates the
measure to be apportioned.

CHAPTER 8. PARASITES.

In August or September, let us go into some gorge with bare and
sun-scorched sides. When we find a slope well-baked by the summer heat,
a quiet corner with the temperature of an oven, we will call a halt:
there is a fine harvest to be gathered there. This tropical land is the
native soil of a host of Wasps and Bees, some of them busily piling the
household provisions in underground warehouses: here a stack of Weevils,
Locusts or Spiders, there a whole assortment of Flies, Bees, Mantes or
Caterpillars, while others are storing up honey in membranous wallets
or clay pots, or else in cottony bags or urns made with the punched-out
disks of leaves.

With the industrious folk who go quietly about their business, the
labourers, masons, foragers, warehousers, mingles the parasitic tribe,
the prowlers hurrying from one home to the next, lying in wait at the
doors, watching for a favourable opportunity to settle their family at
the expense of others.

A heart-rending struggle, in truth, is that which rules the insect world
and in a measure our own world too. No sooner has a worker, by dint
of exhausting labour, amassed a fortune for his children than