So well provided, will they remain quietly underground with their treasure? Not they! The weather is magnificent. The hour of twilight comes, gentle and calm. This is the time of the great flights, the mirthful hummings, the distant explorations on the roads by which the herds have lately passed. My lodgers abandon their cellars and mount to the surface. I hear them buzzing, climbing up the wirework, knocking themselves wildly against the walls. I have anticipated this twilight animation. Provisions have been collected during the day, plentiful as those of yesterday. I serve them. There is the same disappearance during the night. On the morrow, the place is once again swept clean. And this would continue indefinitely, so fine are the evenings, if I always had at my disposal the wherewithal to satisfy those insatiable hoarders.
Rich though his booty be, the Geotrupe leaves it at sunset to sport in the last gleams of daylight and to go in search of a new workplace. With him, one would say, the wealth acquired does not count; the only valid thing is that to be acquired. Then what does he do with his warehouses, renewed, in favourable times, at [[119]]each new twilight? It is obvious that Stercorarius is incapable of consuming provisions so plentiful in a single night. He has such a superabundance of victuals in his larder that he does not know how to dispose of them; he is surfeited with good things by which he will not profit; and, not satisfied with having his store crammed, the acquisitive plutocrat slaves, night after night, to store away more.
From each warehouse, set up here, set up there, as things happen, he deducts the daily meal beforehand; the rest, that is to say, almost the whole, he abandons. My voleries testify to the fact that this instinct for burying is more exacting than the consumer’s appetite. The ground is soon raised, in consequence; and I am obliged, from time to time, to lower the level to the desired limits. If I dig it up, I find it choked, throughout its depth, with hoards that have remained intact. The original earth has become an inextricable conglomerate, which I must prune with a free hand, if I would not go astray in my future observations.
Allowing for errors, either of excess or deficiency, which are inevitable in a subject that does not admit of precise gauging, one point stands out very clearly from my enquiry: the Geotrupes are passionate buriers; they take underground a deal more than is necessary for their consumption. As this work is performed, in varying degrees, by legions of collaborators, large and small, it is evident that the purification of the soil must benefit by it to an ample extent and that the public health is to be congratulated on having this army of auxiliaries in its service.
In other respects, the plant and, indirectly, a host of different existences are interested in these interments. What the Geotrupe buries and abandons the next day [[120]]is not lost: far from it. Nothing is lost in the world’s balance-sheet; the stock-taking total is constant. The little lump of dung buried by the insect will make the nearest tuft of grass grow a luxuriant green. A sheep passes, crops the bunch of grass: all the better for the leg of mutton which man is waiting for. The Dung-beetle’s industry has procured us a savoury mouthful.
In September and October, when the first autumn rains soak the ground and allow the Sacred Beetle to split his natal casket, Geotrupes Stercorarius and Geotrupes Hypocrita found their family-establishments, somewhat makeshift establishments, in spite of what we might have expected from the name of those miners, so well-styled Geotrupes, that is to say, “Earth-borers.” When he has to dig himself a retreat that shall shelter him against the rigours of winter, the Geotrupe really deserves his name: none can compare with him for the depth of the pit or the perfection and rapidity of the work. In sandy ground, easily excavated, I have dug up some that had attained the depth of a metre.[2] Others carried their digging further still, tiring both my patience and my implements. There you have the skilled well-sinker, the incomparable Earth-borer. When the cold sets in, he can go down to some layer where frost has lost its terrors.
Fig. 11.—The Stercoraceous Geotrupe’s sausage.
The lodging of the family is another matter. The propitious season is a short one; time would fail, if each individual grub had to be endowed with one of those manor-houses. That the insect should devote the leisure which the approach of winter gives it to digging a hole of unlimited depth is a capital thing: it makes the retreat doubly safe; and activity, not yet quite suspended, [[122]]has for the moment no other occupation. But, at laying-time, these laborious undertakings are impossible. The hours pass swiftly. In four or five weeks, a pretty numerous family has to be housed and victualled, which puts a long, patiently-sunk pit entirely out of the question.
