As Owen Barfield once said to me, ‘The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives—they have all the works on the outside.’ The works—that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species—the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.
