I put two or three handfuls of my Maillanne haricots in a plate and place the swarming mass full in the sunlight on the edge of my bed of beans. I can imagine what will happen. The insects which are free and those which the stimulus of the sun will soon set free will take to their wings. Finding the fostering plant close by, they will stop and take possession of it. I shall see them exploring the pods and flowers and I shall not have long to wait before I witness the laying. That is how the Pea-weevil would act under similar conditions. Well, no: to my confusion, matters do not fall out as I foresaw. For a few minutes the insects bustle about in the sunlight, opening and closing their wing-cases to ease the mechanism of flight; then one by one they fly off. They mount high in the luminous air; they grow smaller and smaller and are soon lost to view. My persevering attention meets with not the slightest success: not one of the fly-aways settles on the haricots. After tasting the joys of liberty to the full, will they return this evening, to-morrow, the day after? No, they do not return. All the week, at favourable hours, I inspect the rows of beans, flower by flower, pod by pod; never a Weevil do I see, never an egg. And yet it is a propitious time of year, for at this moment the mothers imprisoned in my jars are laying their eggs profusely on the dry haricots. Let us try at another season. I have two other beds which I have had sown with the late haricot, the red cocot, partly for the use of the household, but principally for the sake of the Weevils. Arranged in convenient rows, the two beds will yield their crops one in August, the other in September and later. I repeat with the red haricot the experiment which I made with the black. On several occasions, at opportune times, I release into the tangle of verdure large numbers of Bruchi from my glass jars, the general depot. Each time the result is plainly negative. In vain, all through the season, I repeat my almost daily search, until both the crops are exhausted: I can never discover a single colonized pod, nor even a single Weevil perched upon the plant. And yet this is not for lack of watching. My family are enjoined not to touch any part of certain rows which I reserve for my purposes; they are told to mind the eggs which might occur on the pods gathered. I myself examine the beans brought from my own or the neighbouring gardens, before handing them to the housekeeper to be shelled. All my trouble is wasted: there is nowhere a trace of any laying.