I admire this lucid foresight of the maggot, which foregoes the comfort of the moment for the security of the future. Two dangers threaten it: to be immured in a casket whence the Fly can never issue; or else to die out of doors, from the harsh effects of the air, when the Bee sweeps out the restored cells. To avoid this two-fold peril, it absconds before the door is closed, before the Halictus sets her house in order in July. Let us now see what comes of the parasite’s intrusion. In the course of June, when peace is established in the Halictus’ home, I dig up my largest colony, comprising some fifty burrows, thoroughly. Not an atom of the underground distress shall escape my eye. There are four of us engaged in sifting the excavated earth through our fingers. What one has examined another takes up and examines in his turn; and then another and another yet. The returns are heart-rending. We do not succeed in finding one single nymph of the Halictus. The populous city has perished in its entirety; and its place has been taken by the Dipteron. The latter superabounds in the form of pupæ, which I collect in order to trace their evolution. The year runs its course; and the little russet barrels, into which the original maggots have hardened and contracted, remain stationary. They are seeds endowed with latent life. The heats of July do not rouse them from their torpor. In that month, the period of the second generation of the Halictus, there is a sort of truce of God: the parasite rests and the Bee works in peace. If hostilities were to be resumed straight away, as murderous in summer as they were in spring, the progeny of the Halictus, over-endangered, might possibly disappear. The lull of the second brood puts things in order once more. In April, when Halictus Zebrus, in search of a good place for her burrows, wanders with a wavering flight through the garden-walks, the parasite, on its side, hastens to hatch. Oh, the precise, the terrible agreement between those two calendars, the calendar of the persecutor and the persecuted! At the very moment when the Bee comes out, here is the Gnat: her work of extermination by famine is ready to begin all over again. Were this an isolated case, one’s thoughts would not dwell upon it: an Halictus more or less in the world makes little difference in the general balance. But, alas, brigandage in all its forms is the rule in the eternal conflict of living things! From the lowest to the highest, every producer is imposed upon by the unproductive. Man himself, whose exceptional rank ought to raise him above such pettiness, excels in this ferocious eagerness. He says to himself that business means getting hold of the money of other people, even as the Gnat says to herself that business means getting hold of the Halictus’ honey. And, to play the brigand to better purpose, he invents war, the art of killing wholesale and of doing with glory that which, when done on a smaller scale, leads to the gallows.