THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT 163 



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 in- 

 numerable 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 thicket. She has to discover 

 the honey and pollen that lurk in the labyrinths of the 

 nectaries and in the most secret recess of the anthers. And 

 yet her eyes and olfactory organs are like the eyes and organs 



