Of insects the female is nearly always the superior individual. It is not this marvellous small creature, nature's divergent and minuscule king who offers us the spectacle of the bilhargie, spearwort, whereof the female, mediocre blade, lives, like a sword sheathed in the hollow stomach of the male. This timid life and its perpetual amours would horrify the bold female scarabœa, adroit chalicodomes, cold wise lycoses, and proud, terrible, amazonian mantes. In the insect world the male is the frail elegant sex, gentle and sober, with no employment save to please and to love. To the female the heavy work of digging, of masonry, and the danger of hunt and of war.
There are exceptions, but found chiefly among parasites, among the degraded, like the xenos which lives without distinction upon wasps, coleoptera, and neuroptera. The male is provided with two large wings; the female has neither wings, feet, eyes, nor antennæ; is a small worm. After metamorphosis the male emerges, flies a little, then returns to the female who has remained inside the nymphal envelope, and fecundates her in her wrappings.
Other exceptions, this time normal, are furnished by butterflies, that is to say by a sort of insect which is very placid, and which, at least in the winged form, is addicted neither to hunting nor to any trade or business function. One gives the name "psyche" to a very small butterfly which flutters out rather clumsily in the morning; it is the male. The female is a huge worm, fifteen times as long, ten times as fat. The lovers are in the proportion of a cock to a cow. Here the feminism is wholly ludicrous. There is the same disproportion in the mulberry bombyx, of which the female is much heavier than the male; she flies with difficulty, a passive beast who submits to a fecundation lasting several hours; likewise in the autumn butterfly, cheimatobia, the male sports two pairs of fine wings on a spindle body, the female is a gross fat keg with rudimentary wings, incapable of flight; she climbs difficultly into trees on whose buds her caterpillar feeds itself; in the case of another butterfly which one calls, absurdly, the orgye, the male has all the characteristics of lepidoptera, the female is almost wingless with a heavy and swollen body and a carriage about as pleasing as that of a monstrous wood-louse; there is the same disproportion in the graceful, agile and delicate liparis, known as the zig-zag because of his wing-markings; he would hardly discover his mate without aid from instinct, she being a whitish beast with heavy abdomen ruminating motionless in the tree-bark. Neighbouring species, the monk, the brown-rump, the gold-rump show hardly any sexual differences.
Numeric dimorphism follows dimorphism of mass; the family of one sort of butterfly of the Marquesas Islands is composed of one male and of five females all different, so different that one long supposed them distinct species. Here the advantage is obviously on the side of the male lord of this splendid harem. Nature, profoundly ignorant of our sniveling ideas of justice and equality, vastly pampers certain animal species, while showing herself harsh and indifferent to others; now the male is favoured, now the female, upon whom the greatest mass of superiorities is heaped, and upon whom likewise all the cruelties and disdains. The hymenoptera include bees, bumble-bees, wasps, scolies, ants, masons, sphex, bembex, osmies, etc. The place of these among insects is analogous to that of the primates or even of man among mammifers. But while woman, not animally inferior to her male, remains below him in nearly all intellectual activities, among the hymenoptera the female is both brain and the tool, the engineer, the working-staff, the mistress, mother, and nurse unless, as in the case of bees, she casts upon a third sex all duties not purely sexual. The males make love. The male of the tachyte, a sort of wasp rather like the sphex, is about eight times smaller than the female, but he is a very ardent small lover, marvellously equipped for the amorous quest; his citron-coloured diadem is made of eyes, is a girdle of enormous eyes, a lighthouse whence he explores his horizon, ready to fall like an arrow upon the loitering female. When fecundated, the she-tachyte constructs a cellular nest which she packs with the terrible mantis, of whom she is the always victorious enemy; for knowing by incomprehensible instinct whether she is about to lay a male or a female egg, she augments or diminishes, according to its sex, the larder for the larvæ the tiny male is allotted a dwarf provision.
The male hornet is notably smaller than the female, and the neuter hornet still smaller. The male pine lophyr is black, the female yellow. The male of the chalicodome or mason-bee is russet, the far more beautiful female is a fine velvety black with deep violet wings. While the male loafs and bumbles she artfully and patiently rears the big-domed clay nest where her offspring pass their larvæ days. This bee lives in colonies but the labour is individual, each doing her work without bothering about that of her neighbour, unless it be to rob her or spoil her construction, as in a civilization not unknown to us. The female mason is armed, but by no means aggressive.
In many hymenoptera only the female carries the sword, as in the case of the gilded wasp, gold-striped over blue or red, who can project a long needle from her abdomen; the female philanthe, who is carnivorous, while the puerile unarmed male lives upon flower-pollen. Not disdaining this natural dessert, the female philanthe will attack the nectar-loaded bee with her great dart, stab him and pump out his crop. One may see the ferocious small animal knead the dead bee for half an hour, squeeze him like a lemon, drink him out like a gourd. Charming and candid habits of these winged topazes whirring among the flowers! Fabre has excused this sadique gourmandizing: the philanthe kills bees in order to feed her larvæ, who have, however, so great a repugnance for honey that they die upon contact with it; it is therefore out of sheer maternal devotion that she intoxicates herself with this poison! All things are, in nature, possible. But it might not be unreasonable to say that if the larvæ of the philanthe hate honey, it is because their greatly honey-loving mother has never allowed them a drop of it.
One of the rare cases of hymenoptera where the female appears inferior to the male is the mutille or ant-spider. The male is larger, has wings and lives on flowers. The female is apteral, but provided with a noisy apparatus for attracting the male's attention. The male of the cynips of the oak-apple, the terminal cynips, has a blond body with large diaphanous wings, the brown and black female is wingless. The male yellow cimbex slender, and brown with a spot of yellow, is so different from the round female with yellow belly and black head, that they were long thought of different species.
Ants like all social hymenoptera are, as one knows, divided into three sexes, winged males and females and wingless neuters. Fecundation takes place in the air; the lovers fly up, join, fall enlocked, a golden cloud which the death of the males disperses, while the females, losing their wings, re-enter the house for egg-laying. The workers or neuters are generally smaller, as noticeably in the great red wood-ants, who dig their shelters in stumps. White ants or termites[1] show very accentuated dimorphism; the female or queen having a head almost as large as that of a bee, a belly the thickness of one's finger, long in proportion, and growing to be fifteen times as large as the rest of her body. This sexual tub lays continuously without any let-up at the speed of an egg per second. The male, as in Baudelaire's vision of the giantess, lives in the shadow of this formidable mountain of female power and luxury. Among the termites there is not a fourth sex but a fourth way of being sexless. There are soldiers as well as workers, the soldiers having powerful mandibles mounted on enormous heads. All the termite customs are extraordinary, and their conic nests reach a height having a relation to them that a house five or six hundred metres high would have to us.
Of mosquitoes and maringouin mosquitoes and all insects of that sort, the females alone prick and suck the blood of mammifers. The males live on flowers and tree-trunks. One sees them in forest alleys and clearings, moving regularly as in army manœuvres, they are scouting, watching for females; as soon as a male has caught one he seizes her, and disappears up into the air where the union is accomplished. Only the male cricket has a noise-machine, only the female a hearing