They are our work, but not always our exclusive property.  Wherever food is amassed, the consumers collect from the four corners of the sky; they invite themselves to the feast of abundance, and the richer the food the greater their numbers.  Man, who alone is capable of inducing agrarian abundance, is by that very fact the giver of an immense banquet at which legions of feasters take their place.  By creating more juicy and more generous fruits he calls to his enclosures, despite himself, thousands and thousands of hungry creatures, against whose appetites his prohibitions are helpless.  The more he produces, the larger is the tribute demanded of him.  Wholesale agriculture and vegetable abundance favour our rival the insect.

This is the immanent law.  Nature, with an equal zeal, offers her mighty breast to all her nurslings alike; to those who live by the goods of others no less than to the producers.  For us, who plough, sow, and reap, and weary ourselves with labour, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it also for the little Calender-beetle, which, although exempted from the labour of the fields, enters our granaries none the less, and there, with its pointed beak, nibbles our wheat, grain by grain, to the husk.

For us, who dig, weed, and water, bent with fatigue and burned by the sun, she swells the pods of the pea; she swells them also for the weevil, which does no gardener’s work, yet takes its share of the harvest at its own hour, when the earth is joyful with the new life of spring.

Let us follow the manoeuvres of this insect which takes its tithe of the green pea.  I, a benevolent ratepayer, will allow it to take its dues; it is precisely to benefit it that I have sown a few rows of the beloved plant in a corner of my garden.  Without other invitation on my part than this modest expenditure of seed-peas it arrives punctually during the month of May.  It has learned that this stony soil, rebellious to the culture of the kitchen-gardener, is bearing peas for the first time.  In all haste therefore it has hurried, an agent of the entomological revenue system, to demand its dues.

Whence does it come?  It is impossible to say precisely.  It has come from some shelter, somewhere, in which it has passed the winter in a state of torpor.  The plane-tree, which sheds its rind during the heats of the summer, furnishes an excellent refuge for homeless insects under its partly detached sheets of bark.

I have often found our weevil in such a winter refuge.  Sheltered under the dead covering of the plane, or otherwise protected while the winter lasts, it awakens from its torpor at the first touch of a kindly sun.  The almanack of the instincts has aroused it; it knows as well as the gardener when the pea-vines are in flower, and seeks its favourite plant, journeying thither from every side, running with quick, short steps, or nimbly flying.

A small head, a fine snout, a costume of ashen grey sprinkled with brown, flattened wing-covers, a dumpy, compact body, with two large black dots on the rear segment—­such is the summary portrait of my visitor.  The middle of May approaches, and with it the van of the invasion.