Wasp

“ When the half-closed shutters admit a streak of sunlight to the floor of a room, where the Housefly is taking a luxurious nap or polishing her wings, who has not seen the Wasp rush in, swoop down upon the Fly, crush her in her mandibles and make off with the booty? ”

“ I crossed the open space before the door, and as I did so I noticed, clinging to the trunk and lower branches of a tree at the side of the clearing, what appeared to be a wasp’s nest; but an enormous wasp’s nest, big enough, in all conscience, to contain a man if need be; a wasp’s nest greater than I should have thought could exist in the world. ”

“ One of them, half emerald and half pale-pink, boldly enters the burrow of a Fly-hunting Wasp at the very moment when the mother is at home, bringing a fresh piece of game to her babies, whom she feeds from day to day. The elegant criminal, the Golden Wasp who does not know how to dig, takes this moment when the door is open to enter. ”

“ The Wasp you saw on the wood-pile was selecting [Pg 43] a home, like a careful matron, and was bundling the fibres together to use in the construction of her nest. This she was obliged to do without any help whatever, for all the other wasps had died the previous autumn, while she was left to sleep through the winter in some warm nook, then found a new colony in the spring. ”

“ WASP EATING
While poor humanity takes comfort in a mid-day siesta, wasps love the heat of noontide, and with every rise in temperature they fly faster, hum louder, and rejoice more and more in the fullness of life. The entrance to the Vespa nest was but an inch across ”

“ Probably there is no more steady-headed insect than the wasp, unless it be his noble cousin and prince, the hornet, who has a quite humanlike unquenchable thirst for beer and cider.
But the particular wasp at table I had in my mind remains to be spoken of. I was lunching at the house of a friend, the vicar of a lonely parish in Hampshire, and besides ourselves there were five ladies, four of them young, at our round table. ”

“ The baby wasp has no wings nor feet.
It has to be shut up, to grow into a true wasp. When the time comes, the wasps put a wax lid upon the cell.
At last the new wasp eats off the lid, and comes out, a full-grown wasp. Wasps work hard all the time.
They fly about for food, and for stuff to make paper, wax, and varnish and glue. They have homes to build, and little wasps to rear.
[Pg 31]
They seem to know they must nearly all die, when frost comes. When the cold begins, the old wasps look into the cells.
They kill all the eggs, grubs, and half-grown wasps that they find there. ”

“ The Wasp wishes to make the sand at the entrance to her burrow fine, light, and free from any obstacle, so that when she alights suddenly with a Fly for her children, she can dig an entrance to her home quickly. She does this work in her spare time, when her larva has enough food to last it for a while, so that she does not need to go hunting. She seems happy as she works so fast and eagerly, and who knows that she is not expressing in this way her mother’s satisfaction in watching over the roof of her house where her baby lives? ”

“ Both wasp and spider are soon out of sight, and so remain perhaps for a space of two minutes, when the tips of the nervous antennæ appear at the doorway and the wasp emerges. What now follows is most curious and interesting. With an energy and directness in striking contrast to her previous proceedings, she proceeds to fill the cavity, biting the earth with her mandibles, and with her spiked legs kicking and shoving in the loose soil thus collected, ever and anon backing up to the hole and inserting the tip of her tail to force down the mass. ”

“ Several wasps assemble round each of the returning workers, and receive their respective portions. It is curious and interesting to observe their motions on this occasion. As soon as a wasp that has been filling itself with the juice of fruits arrives at the nest, it perches upon the top, and, disgorging a drop of its saccharine fluid, is attended sometimes by two at once, who share the treasure ”

“ But no; she is exactly over her burrow. Without once letting go her prey, she scratches a little in front of her, gives a push with her head, and at once enters, carrying the Fly. The sand falls in, the door closes, and the Wasp is at home. It makes no difference that I have seen this Wasp return to her nest hundreds of times; I am always astonished to behold the keen-sighted insect find without hesitation a door which does not show at all. ”

“ The wasp's children are not little wasps, yet they are none the less young wasps for being footless, colourless, wingless, stingless grubs. They are eggs at first of course, just as all insects are. When the mother wasp has one cell of her apartment house finished she concerns herself immediately with stocking the larder. Knowing the tastes of her yet unborn young, she leaves for a time the mud hole, and visits the haunts of certain spiders. Finding one to her liking, she captures it. ”

“ The body of the wasp is hard, and made of rings like scales.
Mrs. Wasp uses her jaws to cut up wood for paper. She does not need them to eat with.
She eats honey. When her baby eats spiders and caterpillars, it does not chew them.
It sucks out their juice.
Wasps bite fruit and spoil it. They are cross, and fight.
They kill bees for their honey.
All wasps are not of the same color.
The wasp that leaves her baby alone is the hermit wasp.
There is a wasp of a rust-red color.
LESSON XIV. MRS. WASP’S YEAR.
ROOMS TO LET.
I will now tell you of a wasp that does not live alone. ”

“ The wasps rose to the very roof; they were all round me. I made one frantic scramble up the rusty netting, found a hole, squeezed through anyhow, and just as the first wasp landed on my back and drove a vicious sting through my thick fur, took a wild jump in the direction of the nearest shrub. ”

“ Wild wasp and tutored bee sing sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; with broad coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts alee. Beside a brown coated stone in the shadowed stream a brown trout watches for the puffs that slay the May-flies. Their ephemeral wings were made for a more exquisite life; they endure but one sun; they bear not the touch of the water; they die like a dream dropping into the river. ”

“ She enters, therefore, dwarf as she is, the house of the giantess whose ruin she is planning; she makes her way right to the back, never bothering about the Wasp, with her sting and her powerful jaws. The Wasp-mother either does not know the danger or is paralyzed with terror. She lets the strange Wasp have her way.
Next year, if we open the cells of the poor Fly-hunting Wasp, we shall find some which contain a russet-silk cocoon, the shape of a thimble, with its opening closed with a flat lid. In this silky covering, which is protected by the hard outer shell, is a grub of the Golden Wasp. ”

“ Thus we see that it exerted force in three directions, never twice in the same direction, which fact shows conscious determination and no slight degree of intelligence.
A ground wasp once built a nest beneath the brick pavement in front of my door. The entrance of the nest was situated in the little sulcus, or ditch, between two bricks. While the wasp was absent, I stopped the entrance with a pellet of paper, and, when the little housekeeper returned, she was nonplussed for a moment or two, when she discovered that her doorway had been closed. ”

“ A large wasp, an inch and one half long, which gives so violent a sting, that it sometimes gives the natives a fit of fever. It builds its nest on trees, of light dry grassy matter cemented together. It is black with a yellow patch round the middle of the lower body. ”

“ It has another habit in defending itself which is very curious. When captured it instantly curls its body round, as a wasp does to sting. The suddenness of this action has more than once caused me to drop an insect I had taken, actually thinking for the moment that I had taken hold of a wasp. ”

“ You find a keyhole, or the tap of a filter, filled with mud as the result of this wasp's labours. It works so rapidly that it generally completes its job in the course of a day. An even more inconvenient site for its nest is the sleeve of a garment left hanging on a peg, especially if you put the garment on while the wasp is at work. A small colony of social wasps built their comb under the refectory table of the village Mission-house. ”

“ The marked wasp will always return to the marked nest.
As soon as the cells are completed, the wasp deposits an egg in each, and immediately begins to busy herself about the future welfare of the coming baby wasps. Just here these remarkable creatures show that they possess a mental faculty which far transcends any like act of human intelligence; they are able to tell which of the eggs will produce males and which females. ”

“ The Wasp does not always hesitate in the air before alighting at her house, and when she does, it is because she sees her nest is threatened by a very grave danger. Her plaintive hum shows anxiety; she never gives it when there is no peril. But who is the enemy? It is a miserable little Fly, feeble and harmless in appearance, whom we have mentioned in another chapter. The Wasp, the scourge of the Fly-tribe, the fierce slayer of large Gad-flies, does not enter her home because she sees herself watched by another Fly, a tiny dwarf, who would make scarcely a mouthful for her larvæ. ”

“ The Wasp has seized her, plunged its sharp sting into her body, and shaking the bits of web from its feet flies away. I know what that means. The clay sarcophagus on yonder barn wall shall receive another morsel of preserved meat for a ravenous wasp larva to devour.
What had I to say about this incident? This; I found myself unconsciously asking, "What will destroy the Wasp, in its turn?" But I had no leisure to meditate [Pg xxiv] an answer. A beautiful creature flitted past me, whose colors of orange and black were distinct even in flight. ”

“ What does the Wasp addicted to a predatory life eat, of course in the larval state? Now, to begin with, we see natural sections which adopt as their prey different species of one and the same order, in one and the same group. ”

“ More sounds of concentrated argument followed, and finally there fell out, rather than rushed out, a small and amazingly slender black wasp, one of those hermits who seem to consecrate their lives to lonely working for a family they never see. ”

“ The Wasp I am watching alights in the middle of a Wasp village. She makes the rest of her way on foot. She bestrides her victim and advances, bearing her head proudly aloft and hauling the Cricket, who trails between her legs, by the antennæ held between her jaws. If the ground is bare, she has an easy time ”

“ As I shall mention elsewhere, this is the Fly that lays her eggs on the game the Wasp puts in the nest for her own baby; and the Fly’s offspring eat the food of the Wasp-grub, and sometimes eat the grub itself, if provisions are scarce. The way the Fly manages her business is interesting. She never enters the Wasp’s burrow, but she waits with the greatest patience for the moment when the Wasp dives into her home, with her game clasped between her legs. ”

“ The birds do help us with caterpillars and slugs, I'm bound to own; and then we are always on the look-out to destroy wasps: and as to the birds, I dodge them with netting; and sometimes we take the nests out of the fruit-trees, as much as to tell them to go elsewhere."
That evening Jack went into the gardener's cottage and saw the wasp's nest. It looked like the cells of bees made in whity-brown paper. ”

“ It is not necessary for the wasp to collect honey and pollen for the use of its brood, for these are fed upon insects, the juicy caterpillar and the plump body of the blue-bottle being the morsels which they mostly affect. In the capture of its prey for the use of its young, the wasp works as assiduously as does the owl to gather in field mice for the sustenance of its offspring ”

“ There is one very small wasp that makes no cell or burrow, but chooses a long hole in a piece of wood, or a small bamboo, etc., for the rearing of its larvæ. “Each kind of wasp seems to have its own peculiar way of hunting; some run down on foot by scent for long distances; some dash down violently into the web of a spider, and catch him as he drops from out of it; while others again seize their prey upon the wing, especially the social wasps. The males of all are lazy and do no work.” ”

“ I think it is of the wasp-kind, and plasters its mud nest in all sorts of places. It is afraid of nothing—likes to look at itself in the glass, and leaves its young in our charge. There is another sociable creature—hope it isn’t a wasp—which has built two nests under the edge of this table on which I write to you. ”

“ Nest of the Card-maker Wasp, with part removed to show the arrangement of the Cells.
"Well, then, Uncle Philip, we were right in thinking that wasps were the first paper-makers; [Pg 52] and very glad we are that we saw this old piece of a wasp's nest. Who would have thought that so much could be learned by picking up this old scrap of a wasp's work!"
"Very good sense, boys, in that thought. A wise man will learn something from almost any thing. Use your eyes, and think of what you see. ”

“ Most people think the wasps that live in communities or large families in big paper nests (the yellow-jackets and hornets) are the most interesting and most intelligent or clever of the wasps. But Mary and I do not think so. The solitary wasps do the most wonderful things, and of all they do, the paralyzing of the insects they store up as food for their young is the hardest to explain on any basis except that of wasp [Pg 29] reasoning. ”