SELF-SACRIFICE OF THE WASP. 
287 
of the bee. What, then, is it? The love of the future,—the yearning 
to perpetuate and eternize that which one loves. 
All their love centres in their offspring. 
To love the child and the future; to toil 
in view of time and of that which as yet is 
not; to exhaust their vitality and die of work, 
that posterity may have less cause to labour, 
a noble ideal, assuredly, of society, wherever 
it may be. One can well understand it in those 
who have time before them, and a life to make 
use of, ike men and bees. But that this insect 
which has no time, which perishes in the even- 
ing, should love the time that will never be its 
own, should immolate its little hfe for the sake 
of the life that is to come, should devote to the 
child of to-morrow its solitary day, is a sacrifice 
peculiar to the wasp: it is original and sublime ! 
There is not a minute to lose; and the 
mother incessantly increases the burden. Be- 
sides the female workers, she produces some few 
males who do not work, whose little and very 
brief function scarcely prevails as an excuse for 
their inactivity. Among those tragical and 
serious insect-races, Nature, as if to divert her- 
self a moment by a comical distraction, has 
made the poor little males ordinarily squat and 
obese, innocent little Falstafts, who are guarded 
like a seraglio of unimportant servants. The 
caricature is complete in the case of the male 
bee, which, alleging that it neither knows how 
to glean abroad nor to build at home, passes 
the time in humming before_its bee-hive (like 
our young cigar-smoking idlers). 
Among the wasps life is so tense, burning, and keen, that the very 
males, slothful as they may be, dare not abandon themselves to com- 
