Huber meditated on the best means of protecting his bees against this shameless brigand. Should it be by gratings, or doors? And how? He could not determine. The most skilfully devised barriers have always the inconvenience of impeding the great movement of ingress and egress, which takes place at the threshold of the hive. Their impatience regarded as intolerable the obstructions, which could not fail to embarrass them, and against which they might break their wings. One morning, Huber's faithful assistant, who seconded him in his experiments, brought information that the bees themselves had already solved the problem. In different hives they had conceived and attempted various systems of defence and fortification. Here they constructed a wall of wax, with narrow loopholes, through which the _great_ enemy could not pass. There, by a more ingenious expedient, without creating a single impediment, they built up some inter-crossing arcades at the gates, or tiny cloisters one behind the other, but running in different directions,--that is to say, to the void left by the first corresponded the substance of the second. Thus was secured a number of openings for the impatient buzzing crowd, which might go in and out as usual, with no other difficulty than that of moving in a slightly zigzag fashion. At the same time, a complete barrier was obtained against the great and _big_ enemy, which could no longer enter with expanded wings, nor even glide uninjured through the narrow corridors. It was the _coup d'état_ of the brute creation, the revolution of the insects, executed by the bees, not only against their plunderers, but against the calumniators who had denied their intelligence. The theorists who had refused to believe in it, the Malebranches and the Buffons, were compelled to own themselves beaten. They had to adopt the reserve of eminent observers, like Swammerdam and Réaumur, who, far from questioning the genius of insects, furnish us with numerous facts in proof of its flexibility, of its rising to the measure of great dangers, of its scorn of routine, and of its power to make unexpected progress under certain circumstances. [Illustration] [Illustration: IX.--THE BEES: ON THE WING.] [Illustration] CHAPTER IX. HOW THE BEES CREATE THE PEOPLE AND THE COMMON MOTHER. In the life of the bees, all things are brought to bear on the welfare of the infant. Let us see, then, this object of love. Let us see what is lying at the bottom of the cell; her who has just been created, the little virgin of toil. She is born in a condition of singular purity; so much so that she is not even provided with the organ of the inferior necessities. On a delicate mixture of honey and flower dust, which is constantly renewed, you see nothing at first but a comma, then a C, a spiral. But she already lives, is organized, and active; so that on the eighth day, like a skilful spinner, she weaves her network of metamorphosis.