With the tip of the little finger let us gather this drop from the still and taste it. Delicious! In taste and aroma it is very nearly equal to honey. If the Kermes were to lend itself to wholesale rearing as well as to the easy harvesting of its product, we should have in it a valuable sugar-refiner. But it is for others to exploit it with the needful diligence and devotion.
These others are the Ants, those patient harvesters. They make for the Kermes even more eagerly than for the Plant-louse or Green-fly. The latter is niggardly in the matter of yielding its ambrosia; the Ant has to solicit it with patience; tickling its paunch before she can obtain even a meagre sip from the tips of its tiny horns. The Kermes is a spendthrift. Fully consenting, and at any moment, it permits all comers to [[317]]quench their thirst from its cellar, and its liquid largesse is offered in streams.
The Ants, therefore, crowd about the distillery; they form quite a company; by threes and fours they lick the opening of the gourd-like vessel; and however high the Kermes is installed amidst the foliage of the oak, they possess a most wonderful power of discovering it. When I see one slowly climbing I have only to follow her with my eyes; she takes me straight to the Ant’s tavern. She is my infallible guide when, still in its early youth, the Kermes by its minuteness would escape the glance of an eye not warned and on the alert. Even the very tiny insects are perambulating taverns and are well frequented like the big ones.
On the tree, in the full liberty of the fields, the diligence of the Ants, collecting the syrup as it oozes forth, will hardly permit us to estimate the value of the spring. The little round barrel, incessantly drained dry, shows barely a trace of moisture round the bung-hole. We must take an isolated twig, far from thirsty drinkers, to determine the true value of this flask of nectar. Then, in [[318]]the absence of the Ants, we see the liquor collecting with considerable rapidity in a drop of surprising volume. The extravasated fluid exceeds the capacity of the beaker, and the trickling continues, as evenly and abundantly as before. The sugar-refinery is now in permanent business; when there is no syrup left there is still plenty to come.
The Ants rear the Plant-lice, their milch-cows. What herds they would amass, what incalculable benefits they would derive therefrom, if the Kermes could only be reared in captivity! But it is found only in isolated groups, which, for that matter, are not numerous in themselves, and it cannot be moved from spot to spot. Removed from its position it dies, unable to take root elsewhere. The Ants exploit it where they find it, without the slightest effort to gather together a flock of Lice in a leafy chalet. Their ingenuity wisely draws back when confronted by the impossible.
What is the purpose of this nectar, so plentiful and so highly appreciated by the connoisseur? Can it be that it flows forth for the benefit of the Ants? After all, why not? In virtue of their number and their [[319]]activity as harvesters, they perform a function of far-reaching significance in the general picnic of living creatures. As the price of their services, they are granted the horn-shaped nectar of the Plant-louse and the fountain of the Kermes.
At the end of May let us break open the black capsule. Beneath the envelope, hard and brittle, a hasty dissection shows us eggs: nothing but eggs. We looked for the apparatus of a distiller of liqueurs, for rows of retorts; we find only an obtrusive ovary. The Kermes is little more than a coffer bursting with germs.
The germs are white, and assembled to the number of thirty or thereabouts, in little groups or clusters, which remind us, as regards their arrangement, of the masses of seeds in the buttercup. Tufts of extremely fine tracheal filaments encompass the glomeruli, surrounding them with an inextricable litter which makes an exact count impossible. A rough approximation gives us a hundred. The total of the eggs would therefore be some thousands.
What does the Kermes want with this prodigious number of offspring? An alchemist [[320]]of the general food supply, it does as do so many others among the humble creatures predestined to the elaboration of nutritive molecules: by means of excess numbers it seeks to avert the extermination with which it is threatened. With its liquor it provides the Ant, an importunate guest perhaps, but not a dangerous one, with a delicious beverage; on the other hand, with its eggs it nourishes a consumer who would lead to the extinction of the Kermes, were it not itself subjected to a drastic thinning out.
It has so happened that I have found the lover of omelettes at work. It is a negligible little grub which creeps from one tiny cluster to another, emptying his eggs still enclosed in their natal sheath. As a usual thing it is alone; sometimes it has companions—two, three or more. Ten, according to my notes, is the largest number recorded by its holes of exit.