the honey-paste destined for the young is stored; they are
perfect in the art of excavating storehouses of food for their grubs.

This stupendous labour of construction and provisioning, this labour
that absorbs the insect's whole life, is the work of the mother only,
who wears herself out at her task. The father, intoxicated with
sunlight, lies idle on the threshold of the workshop, watching the
heroic female at her work, and regards himself as excused from all
labour when he has plagued his neighbours a little.

Does he never perform useful work? Why does he not follow the example
of the swallows, each of whom brings a fair share of the straw and
mortar for the building of the nest and the midges for the young brood?
No, he does nothing; perhaps alleging the excuse of his relative
weakness. But this is a poor excuse; for to cut out little circles from
a leaf, to rake a little cotton from a downy plant, or to gather a
little mortar from a muddy spot, would hardly be a task beyond his
powers. He might very well collaborate, at least as labourer; he could
at least gather together the materials for the more intelligent mother
to place in position. The true motive of his idleness is ineptitude.

It is a curious thing that the Hymenoptera, the most skilful of all
industrial insects, know nothing of paternal labour. The male of the
genus, in whom we should expect the requirements of the young to develop
the highest aptitudes, is as useless as a butterfly, whose family costs
so little to establish. The actual distribution of instinct upsets our
most reasonable previsions.

It upsets our expectations so completely that we are surprised to find
in the dung-beetle the noble prerogative which is lacking in the bee
tribe. The mates of several species of dung-beetle keep house together
and know the worth of mutual labour. Consider the male and female
Geotrupes, which prepare together the patrimony of their larvae; in their
case the father assists his companion with the pressure of his robust
body in the manufacture of their balls of compressed nutriment. These
domestic habits are astonishing amidst the general isolation.

To this example, hitherto unique, my continual researches in this
direction permit me to-day to add three others which are fully as
interesting. All three are members of the corporation of dung-beetles. I
will relate their habits, but briefly, as in many respects their history
is the same as that of the Sacre