The Mason-Bees quotes

'That will do,' says the unconscious abbe. 'You can get down, Bastien. Take a note of it, boys: the longer leg of the barometer is open; take a note of it. It's a thing you might forget; I had forgotten it myself.'

Thus was physics taught.

Things improved, however: a master came and came to stay, one who knew that the long leg of the barometer is closed. I myself secured tables on which my pupils were able to write instead of scribbling on their knees;

The purchase was effected. That day my professional emoluments were severely strained: I devoted a month's salary to the acquisition of the book. I had to resort to miracles of economy for some time to come before making up the enormous deficit.

The book was devoured; there is no other word for it.

In it, I learnt the name of my black Bee; I read for the first time various details of the habits of insects;

Cf. "The Life of the Spider", by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chapter 1; and "The Life of the Fly": chapter 1.—Translator's Note.); and, while I turned over the pages for the hundredth time, a voice within me seemed to whisper:

'You also shall be of their company!'

Ah, fond illusions, what has come of you? (The present essay is one of the earliest in the "Souvenirs Entomologiques."—Translator's Note.)

'You also shall be of their company!'

Ah, fond illusions, what has come of you?

(The present essay is one of the earliest in the "Souvenirs Entomologiques."—Translator's Note.)

it would, in short, have to make into a double act that which by nature is a single one; and the insect cannot do this, for the sole reason that it has not the wish to.

The Mason-bee perishes for lack of the smallest gleam of intelligence.

And this is the singular intellect in which it is the fashion nowadays to see a germ of human reason! The fashion will pass and the facts remain, bringing us back to the good old notions of the soul and its immortal destinies.

The Mason-bee perishes for lack of the smallest gleam of intelligence. And this is the singular intellect in which it is the fashion nowadays to see a germ of human reason!

The fashion will pass and the facts remain, bringing us back to the good old notions of the soul and its immortal destinies.

Reaumur tells us how his friend Duhamel, having seized a Mason-bee with a forceps when she had half entered the cell, head foremost, to fill it with pollen-paste, carried her to a closet at some distance from the spot where he captured her.

To come home again from the verge of the horizon is wonderful in itself; to come home with a well-filled pollen-brush is superlative economy.

A journey, even a forced journey, always becomes a foraging-expedition.

She finds the stranger in the nest:

She goes off, in fact, to try her luck. I wish her success, being myself the cause of this desperate act.

My curiosity has turned an honest worker into a robber.

Things may take a still more serious turn, so invincible, so imperious is the desire to have the booty stored in a safe place without delay.

It goes to my heart to abandon an idea suggested by so famous a man of science and cherished all the more readily inasmuch as I thought it likely to provide a final solution.

The facts are there, more eloquent than any number of ingenious views; and the problem remains as mysterious as ever.

In the following year, 1881, I began experimenting again, but in a different way. Hitherto, I had worked on the level. To return to the nest, my lost Bees had only to cross slight obstacles, the hedges and spinneys of the tilled fields.

Naturally, in setting down these lines, I take shelter behind the mighty reputation of the learned begetter of the idea. It would not be accepted as serious coming from a humble person like myself.

Obscurity cannot afford these audacious theories.

The experiment seems easy; it is not beyond the means at my disposal. Let us attempt it. I magnetise a very fine needle by rubbing it with my bar magnet; I retain only the slenderest part, the point, some five or six millimetres long.

The straw produces the same effects as the magnet, in other words, magnetism had nothing to do with what happened. My invention, in both cases alike, is a cumbrous tackle of which the Bee tries to rid herself at once by every possible means.

To look to her for normal actions so long as she carries an apparatus, magnetized or not, upon her back is the same as expecting to study the natural habits of a Dog after tying a kettle to his tail.

The experiment with the magnet is impracticable. What would it tell us if the insect consented to it? In my opinion, it would tell us nothing. In the matter of the homing instinct, a magnet would have no more influence than a bit of straw.

what is this but the recognition of a magnetic sense? Do we possess a similar faculty? I am speaking, of course, of the magnetism of the physicists and not of the magnetism of the Mesmers and Cagliostros. Assuredly we possess nothing remotely like it.

What need would the mariner have of a compass, were he himself a compass?

And this is what the great scientist acknowledges: a special sense, so foreign to our organism that we are not able to form a conception of it, guides the Pigeon, the Swallow, the Cat, the Mason-bee and a host of others when away from home.

… in the course of time, favouring the best-endowed and leaving the less well-endowed to perish, how comes it that this wonderful sense is the portion of a humble few and that it has left no trace in man, the culminating achievement of the zoological progression?

Our precursors were very ill-advised to let so magnificent an inheritance go: it was better worth keeping than a vertebra of the coccyx or a hair of the moustache.

Does not the fact that this sense has not been handed down to us point to a flaw in the pedigree? I submit the little problem to the evolutionists;

Sight would not be enough, if the Amazon had not also at her service a correct memory for places.

The memory of an Ant! What can that be?

In what does it resemble ours? I have no answers to these questions; but a few words will enable me to prove that the insect has a very exact and persistent recollection of places which it has once visited.

Well, does this superior, this privileged being reason?

Reader, do not smile: this is a most serious matter, well worthy of our consideration.

To devote our attention to animals is to plunge at once into the vexed question of who we are and whence we come. What, then, passes in that little Hymenopteron brain? Has it faculties akin to ours, has it the power of thought?

What a problem, if we could only solve it; what a chapter of psychology, if we could only write it! But, at our very first questionings, the mysterious will rise up, impenetrable: we may be convinced of that.

We are incapable of knowing ourselves; what will it be if we try to fathom the intellect of others?

Let us be content if we succeed in gleaning a few grains of truth.

And here is a still greater absurdity: the plugging once begun is very carefully finished with fresh relays of mortar! Exquisite attention is paid to a closing-up which is henceforth useless; no attention at all to the dangerous beam.

O little gleams of reason that are said to enlighten the animal, you are very near the darkness, you are naught!

Another and still more eloquent fact will finally convince whoso may yet be doubting. The ration of honey stored up in a cell is evidently measured by the needs of the coming larva. There is neither too much nor too little.

… 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 the non-producers come hastening up to contend for its possession. To one who amasses there are sometimes five, six or more bent upon his ruin;

Have I not seen the Anthophora-bee, at the door to her dwelling, stand a little to one side and make room for the Melecta to enter the honey-stocked cells and substitute her family for the unhappy parent's?

One would think that they were two friends meeting on the threshold, one going in, the other out!

It is written in the book of fate: everything shall happen without impediment in the burrow of the Bembex;

But these rare coincidences are faced, under exactly similar conditions, by inconsistencies so strongly marked and so numerous that, having frequency on their side, they ought, in all logic, to serve as the basis of the law.

Here, one fact says yes; there, a thousand facts say no.

To which evidence shall we lend an ear? If we only wish to bolster up a theory, it would be prudent to listen to neither. The how and why escapes us;

'

Mimesis is an illusion which we should do well to relegate to oblivion.

'

What then is parasitism, if one must look for it among animals of different races? Life in general is but a vast brigandage. Nature devours herself; matter is kept alive by passing from one stomach into another.

At the banquet of life, each is in turn the guest and the dish; the eater of to-day becomes the eaten of tomorrow; hodie tibi, cras mihi.

Everything lives on that which lives or has lived; everything is parasitism. Man is the great parasite, the unbridled thief of all that is fit to eat.

What then is parasitism, if one must look for it among animals of different races?

Life in general is but a vast brigandage.

Nature devours herself; matter is kept alive by passing from one stomach into another. At the banquet of life, each is in turn the guest and the dish; the eater of to-day becomes the eaten of tomorrow; hodie tibi, cras mihi.

And mark me, first of all, I do not like that laziness which is said to favour the animal's prosperity. I have also believed and I still persist in believing that activity alone strengthens the present and ensures the future both of animals and men.

To act is to live; to work is to go forward.

The energy of a race is measured by the aggregate of its action.

The Bee is as forgetful of her cell of yesterday as she is jealous of her actual cell.

To her the present is everything; the past means nothing; and the future means no more.

And so the population of the tile leave the breakers of doors to do their business in peace; none hastens to the defence of a home that might well be her own. How differently things would happen if the cell were still on the stocks!

The labour is not reduced; it is increased. It would pay the Bee infinitely better, if she wants to continue her laying, to make her home in an unoccupied tube.

The Osmia thinks differently.

Her reasons for acting as she does escape me. Can there be ill-conditioned characters among her, characters that delight in a neighbour's ruin? There are among men.

'Yes, that's the Red Sea,' said the priest, examining the masterpiece before paying for it. 'That's the Red Sea, right enough; but where are the Israelites?'

'They have passed,' replied the painter.

'They are on the way.'

'They are on the way.'

Transformations have passed, transformations are on the way.

For mercy's sake, cannot they show us transformations in the act? Must the facts of the past and the facts of the future necessarily exclude the facts of the present? I fail to understand.

The Scoliae feed their grubs on prey; so do the Mutillae. The Osmia's parasite, therefore, if it really derives from a transformed ancestor, is descended from a flesh-eater, though it is now an eater of honey.

The Wolf does more than become a Sheep: he turns himself into a sweet-tooth.

'You will never get an apple-tree out of an acorn,' Franklin tells us, with that homely common-sense of his.

'You will never get an apple-tree out of an acorn,' Franklin tells us, with that homely common-sense of his.

In this case, the passion for jam must have sprung from a love of venison.

Any theory might well be deficient in balance when it leads to such vagaries as this.

I should have to write a volume if I would go on setting forth my doubts. I have said enough for the moment.

Man, the insatiable enquirer, hands down from age to age his questions about the whys and wherefores of origins.

Answer follows answer, is proclaimed true to-day and recognized as false tomorrow; and the goddess Isis continues veiled.

The thread itself gives convulsive tremblings; it comes out of its scabbard, goes back and slips out again.

It is as though the laying-implement could not persuade itself to die before accomplishing its mission.

The insect's supreme aim is the egg; and, so long as the least spark of life remains, it makes dying efforts to lay.