ss a human being has injured them. The worst of it is
they do not discriminate between one human being and another, and the
bee that floats over the wall into our garden may turn out to have
been exasperated by the behaviour of a retired policeman five miles
away who struck at it with a spade and roused in it a blind passion
for reprisals. That or something like it is, probably, the explanation
of the stings perfectly innocent persons receive from an insect that
is said never to touch you if you leave it alone. As a matter of fact,
when a bee loses its head, it does not even wait for a human being in
order to relieve its feelings, I have seen a dog racing round a field
in terror as a result of a sting from an angry bee. I have seen a
turkey racing round a farmyard in terror as a result of the same
thing. All the trouble arose from a human being's having very properly
removed a large quantity of honey from a row of hives. I do not admit
that the bee would have been justified in stinging even the human
being--who, after all, is master on this partially civilised planet.
It had certainly no right to sting the dog or the turkey, which had as
little to do with stealing the honey as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford
University. Yet in spite of such things, and of the fact that some
breeds of bees are notorious for their crossness, especially when
there is thunder in the air, the bee is morally far higher in the
scale than the mosquito. Not only does it give you honey instead of
malaria, and help your apples and strawberries to multiply, but it
aims at living a quiet, inoffensive life, at peace with everybody,
except when it is annoyed. The mosquito does what it does in cold
blood. That is why it is so unwelcome a bedroom visitor.

But even a bee or a wasp, I fancy, would seem tedious company at two
in the morning, especially if it came and buzzed near the pillow. It
is not so much that you would be frightened: if the wasp alighted on
your cheek, you could always lie still and hold your breath till it
had finished trying to sting--that is an infallible preventive. But
there is a limit to the amount of your night's rest that you are
willing to sacrifice in this way. You cannot hold your breath while
you are asleep, and yet you dare not cease holding your breath while a
wasp is walking over your face. Besides, it might crawl into your ear,
and what would you do then? Luckily, the question does not often arise
in practice owing to th