Even if one has never seen the Pelopaeus, one readily conceives an impression of "her wasp-like costume, and curving abdomen, suspended at the end of a long thread." What exactitude in this snapshot, taken at the moment when the insect is occupied in scooping out of the mire the lump of mud intended for the construction of her nest: "like a skilled housekeeper, with her clothing carefully tucked up that it may not be soiled, the wings vibrating, the limbs rigidly straightened, the black abdomen well raised on the end of its yellow stalk, she rakes the mud with the points of her mandibles, skimming the shining surface." (12/4.) He draws, in passing, this charming sketch of the gadfly, the pest of horses, which nourishes itself with their blood: "Gadflies of several species used to take refuge under the silken dome of my umbrella, and there they would quietly rest, one here, one there, on the tightly stretched fabric; I rarely lacked their company when the heat was overpowering. To while away the hours of waiting, I used to love to watch their great golden eyes, which would shine like carbuncles on the vaulted ceiling of my shelter; I used to love to watch them slowly change their stations, when the excessive heat of some point of the ceiling would force them to move a little." (12/5.) We follow all the manoeuvres of the Balaninus, the acorn-weevil, "burying her drill" which "operates by means of little bites." The narrator calls our attention to the slightest episodes, even to those accidents which sometimes surprise the worker in the course of her labours; when, with the rostrum buried deep in the acorn, her feet suddenly lose their hold. Then the unhappy creature, unable to free herself, finds herself suspended in the air, at right angles to her proboscis, far from any foothold or point of vantage, at the extremity of her disproportionately long pike, that "fatal stake." (12/6.) As for the poplar-weevil, we can almost see it moving "in the subtlest equilibrium, clinging with its hooked talons to the slippery surface of the leaf"; we watch all the details of its methods and the progress of its labours. We see the flexed leaf assume the vertical under the awl-stroke which the insect applies to the pedicle, "when, partially deprived of sap, the leaf becomes more flexible, more malleable; it is in a sense partly paralysed, only half alive." Then we follow the rolling process; "the imperturbable deliberation of the worker as it rolls its cigar, which finally hangs perpendicularly at the end of the bent and wounded stem." (12/7.) Fabre, like a true artist, finds all sorts of expressions to describe the tiny, fragile eggs of his insects; little shining pearls, delicious coffers of nickel or amber, miniature pots of translucid alabaster, "which we might think were stolen from the cupboard of a fairy."