While she lives in their midst the lovers about her know not what she is.  They seek her in space, in the remote depths of the horizon, never suspecting that they have but this moment quitted her, have shared the same comb with her, have brushed against her, perhaps, in the eagerness of their departure.  One might almost believe that those wonderful eyes of theirs, that cover their head as though with a glittering helmet, do not recognise or desire her save when she soars in the blue.  Each day, from noon till three, when the sun shines resplendent, this plumed horde sallies forth in search of the bride, who is indeed more royal, more difficult of conquest, than the most inaccessible princess of fairy legend; for twenty or thirty tribes will hasten from all the neighbouring cities, her court thus consisting of more than ten thousand suitors; and from these ten thousand one alone will be chosen for the unique kiss of an instant that shall wed him to death no less than to happiness; while the others will fly helplessly round the intertwined pair, and soon will perish without ever again beholding this prodigious and fatal apparition.

[83]

I am not exaggerating this wild and amazing prodigality of nature.  The best-conducted hives will, as a rule, contain four to five hundred males.  Weaker or degenerate ones will often have as many as four or five thousand; for the more a hive inclines to its ruin, the more males will it produce.  It may be said that, on an average, an apiary composed of ten colonies will at a given moment send an army of ten thousand males into the air, of whom ten or fifteen at most will have the occasion of performing the one act for which they were born.

In the meanwhile they exhaust the supplies of the city; each one of the parasites requiring the unceasing labour of five or six workers to maintain it in its abounding and voracious idleness, its activity being indeed solely confined to its jaws.  But nature is always magnificent when dealing with the privileges and prerogatives of love.  She becomes miserly only when doling out the organs and instruments of labour.  She is especially severe on what men have termed virtue, whereas she strews the path of the most uninteresting lovers with innumerable jewels and favours.  “Unite and multiply; there is no other law, or aim, than love,” would seem to be her constant cry on all sides, while she mutters to herself, perhaps:  “and exist afterwards if you can; that is no concern of mine.”  Do or desire what else we may, we find, everywhere on our road, this morality that differs so much from our own.  And note, too, in these same little creatures, her unjust avarice and insensate waste.  From her birth to her death, the austere forager has to travel abroad in search of the myriad flowers that hide in the depths of the thickets.  She has to discover the honey and pollen that lurk in the labyrinths of the nectaries and in the most secret recesses of the anthers.  And