Those Wasps of Ours

I

WHEN my annual springtime seizure came on, — a fever of activity, which gradually mounts to dreams of Art and Beauty, and finally expends itself in paint, — I unjointed the extension ladder, put on the special suit of clothes, more varied than Joseph’s coat, and proceeded to outshine the neighborhood.

For the purpose of outshining the neighborhood, a stone house, whose window casings and roof trim happen to be of wood, is an excellent device. It needs but little paint, and yet it looks so completely dressed up in the little that it gets! A few hours’ work with white lead and zinc, a final few outlines of apple green, and lo and behold!

Such a house, rightly ensconced amid trees and shrubbery, needs but a ribbon or two, a white band of cornice, and some green edging to outline the gauzy screen, and immediately you have put a new bonnet on Nature.

You can make it white, white. And the comma does not really belong there. By which we mean that you are one of the few in these days who can afford to be particular about the shade of white. And as for green fading so quickly, — an item of serious concern to your neighbor, — that need not trouble you. Those softly verdant squares of apple green, with which the white is so beautifully picked out, will naturally be done over every spring while you are ‘at it.’

Your neighbor, to whom painting or washing means a problem of workmen and the expenditure of much money, can never hope to keep up with such a programme. He paints only now and then, somewhat white; and he appears as through a glass darkly, while you come out with the trees and the flowers, as up-to-the-minute as spring herself.

As I was saying, I unlimbered the ladder, put on the old coat, which might almost be called a coat of paint, and prepared to be at it. In a gallon can, I had white. It was white of that particular purity which is demanded by the mansioneers of Virginia; and I had discovered a manufacturer who puts up paint with just the right eye of apple green. The dream was about to be fulfilled.

Vaulting ambition! When the paint had been well paddled, I made a trip round the house to take a precursory view of the whole circuit of cornice; and then I discovered that, before I had done, there would be eight interruptions in the work. Each of the interruptions would consist of a wasp’s nest.

After a while, I sought the seclusion of my study. I had not been stung — as yet; but I thought it well to go into consultation. As I should be meeting the wasps up a ladder, with a bucket of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, I should be dealing with them at a great disadvantage. It takes quite a while to come down a ladder — providing, of course, you come down the usual way.

Now there are many kinds of wasps. Some arc social and some solitary. Some dig into the ground, some build in the open. Some have a sting only to paralyze their prey, others only to sting you. Some are harmless, and others highly to be feared.

The latter, the ferocious, warlike, and highly defensive wasps, hang their nest up by a stalk or pedicle. Some of them suspend themselves in full view and bid defiance to all comers. Of these there are three genera, the Vespa, the Polybia, and the Polistes; but they are all similar in nature, and exactly alike in the regard that their sting is not intended to be used on other insects. Mine were Polistes.

The Vespa are the kind that protect their work from the weather by a pasteboard covering in the shape of a football. They build combs in parallel sections, to fit the football shape.

The Polistes do not bother about a covering. Having made their stem or stalk firmly rooted to your cornice in a plastering of mud, the mother wasp builds a few cells on it and starts upon the work of the season. The children hatch out and take up the work; and they keep right on enlarging the single layer of comb, building round and round its edges, till finally it resembles a sunflower hanging by its stem. Their home, unlike that of the Vespa, is open to the light of day.

As it is also open to the weather, this denomination of wasp, judging from what I have seen of it, is strongly inclined toward a sheltered situation. Here was the reason that I was favored with so many colonies. My dormer windows have eaves of the broad, sheltering kind; and at the upper end, where the cornice joins the roof at a sharp angle, there is a deep nook or corner, which is almost impervious to wind or rain. There are four dormer windows; hence, eight colonies of wasps.

I had never been afraid of wasps, meeting them in the usual way. Like the bees and all their industrious kind, they are marvels of preoccupation. They continue to be preoccupied up to the point where you attract their attention. They have an English point of view—their house is their castle; and their motto seems to be a Caledonian one — Noli me tangere.

But this is not practical. You can hardly paint around a wasp’s nest and let it sufficiently alone. And so, before resolving upon some course of action, I thought it well to look closely into the real nature — the psychology — of the wasp. Thus it was that, after several trips up the ladder, reaching about the same altitude each time, I finally came down and went into my study.

Taking down the first book in the Nature department, I began to read. ‘After considering the peaceful community of the bees, few perhaps will be tempted to observe the manners and habits of wasps. The one may be looked upon as a highly civilized and humane tribe, seldom gaining their bread by violent means — the other as a ferocious tribe, subsisting solely by rapine and murder.’ It went on in that vein, without telling me how I could cope with them. Not very encouraging.

Next at hand was Jordan and Kellogg’s Animal Life. Here I found a profusion of pictures along with what I was looking for — a philosophic tone. But the authors, after describing a wasp’s nest, break off with the remark that it is ‘a thing to be left untouched.’

The fact was that I had gone into the library hoping to find someone who would tell me not to be afraid of wasps. Not getting any encouragement from the formal textbooks, I decided to make a deeper study of the specialists, especially Fabre. Here I would find fearless and practical men.

I opened Fabre’s Hunting Wasps. And now I began to smell out a state of affairs — not quickly and right at the beginning, but after much reading and puttings things together. The ‘hunting wasps,’ as they are here called, are all solitary wasps. There is only one of her to a nest, and she cannot sting very effectively, even if she tries. I was much disappointed in Fabre’s book when I found that it was wholly concerned with this variety of insect.

A Solitary Wasp digs a hole in the ground and deposits an egg at the bottom. Then she grapples with a caterpillar or a cricket, injects poison into it in such a way that it becomes helpless, and places the paralytic in the hole with the egg. And having thus provided for the future needs of her child, she has no more to do with it. As her little supply of poison is so necessary to the preservation of the race, she is loath to waste it on you.

The Social Wasps — and mine were very social — have no such use for their sting. They kill their prey; and they do it simply by tearing it to pieces. They reduce it at once to the form of sausage and take it home to their children before it spoils. Their vast multitude of babies, ‘near a whole cityful,’are fed like the young of birds, from hour to hour and minute to minute; and this work, together with building new cells for the ever-growing colony, is what keeps a social wasp so busy throughout, the summer of her life. She is equipped with a sting especially for purposes of defense. And so, by a wise provision of Nature, it hurts.

For reasons purely literary, it seems, Fabre’s book is called The Hunting Wasps. I say for reasons purely literary, because all wasps are hunters, especially the social kind, and there is hardly any basis for making such a distinction in favor of the solitary varieties. The Solitary Wasp is an assassin, or rather an expert surgeon, not killing her prey, but knowing just how to inject the paralyzing fluid at the nervous centre of the motor system. But Hunting Wasps makes a good title. It sounds well. It connotes combat and adventure; it has a touch of derring-do. And so does ‘Predatory Wasps,’ another term by which he distinguishes the solitary kind, when, as a matter of fact, the Social Wasps are ten times more predatory.

You see, dear reader, having come so hurriedly down the ladder, I was hardly in a frame of mind to take kindly to the little literary tergiversations of my author. Up there were eight colonies of real wasps, the red-hot homes of stingers, at the height of the season’s activities; and I had to go up there and deal with them, not singly, but en masse. And here was the patient and peaceful author, sitting by the hole of a solitary wasp, watching what she was doing, or waiting for her to come home!

Fabre has written two other books upon the subject, More Hunting Wasps and The Mason Wasps; but as these are manifestly concerned with the solitary kind, they hardly appeal to a man who is trying to paint a house. I saw easily enough by his first volume that it is advisable to let social wasps alone. He does not say this explicitly: I got it by deduction. When he went out to investigate wasps, he chose the solitary kind. I was disappointed after so much reading, — the title had misled me, — and the reader will please take this into account if I seem a little waspish.

I turned now to our great American authorities, the Peckhams. Theirs is a more promising title—Wasps, Social and Solitary. I was drawing near home.

But what was my disappointment to find that in this book the wasps were issuing from the ground! And to read at the very forefront of the work, preluding all the ‘experiments,’ a statement which, although discouraging to me, is admirable for its complete candor and honesty with the public. They say: ‘Experiments which would have been dangerous to life and limb, had we tried them with a nest hanging in the open, were easy here, so long as we kept calm and unflurried.’

Here we find that there are social wasps, the so-called common wasps, which fall into subterranean habits. You may experiment with one or two of them, as they issue forth, because the rest of the wasps do not know you are doing it. My wasps were social enough — that much I knew, But instead of being underground, they were at the upper end of a ladder.

Students do not seem to specialize with them under those circumstances. It is comparatively easy, or at least safe, to follow a social wasp afield, noting what prey she pounces upon, how she makes it into meat, and how she conducts herself in general. But to follow her home with the meat, and note her little ways in the bosom of her family — that is something different. It is the solitary wasp, with her home affairs, that gets oftenest into print.

To the practical man, wasp-books are of little use. They are not like the beebooks, written for the trade and telling you what to do. And so I saw that I might as well get back to my work. It was Art, not Science, that I was interested in. I wanted to get the house painted. I went out to conduct some experiments of my own.

II

It is easy enough to get rid of a wasp’s nest, but not so easy to get rid of the wasps. This I found out by means of a fishpole. When the nest, knocked loose from its fastenings, came rolling wheellike down the slope of roof, and was carried by its impetus far out into the yard, I expected to see the whole colony following it, solicitous for the welfare of their young. But this was a wrong theory. They kept coming back and paying attention to the place where the nest ought to have been. Pretty soon, the whole population, including those that had been afield and now came home with provisions which they did not know what to do with, were clustered upon the mud-plastered pedicle, or flying round, ‘as mad as hornets’ — a comparison which is faulty here, owing to the fact that a hornet is a wasp.

It was just at this stage of affairs that I again retired into the library. And then I had an idea.

When next I appeared upon the ladder, I carried in my hand a long stick, on the end of which was a sort of boxingglove. This big pillowy weapon, well soaked in a quart of ammonia, was intended to push the whole nest into the corner, and by snugly conforming to the shape of roof and cornice on all three sides, shut off all means of escape. I thrust it firmly home and held it there.

For an appreciable part of a minute there were no signs of life. I had them bottled up. I imagined them suffocating by hundreds. Then came the exit.

At the upper end, where my boxingglove had not quite reached into a sharp angle, there was an opening about as big as the bore of a rifle; and from this place the wasps began to shoot. It was as if I had just started up a machine gun, with my shoulder resolutely pressed against the butt. How many wasps came forth per second I cannot say; but they followed one another with a speed and precision that was highly military; and all on the same straight line of fire. I could barely see each one as it shot past, as a camera might catch a bullet before it has vanished into space. Strange to say, with all their hurry to get out, they did not jam the bore. No human crowd could ever, in like circumstances, organize itself into such an orderly panic.

As it was not a scattering fire, but a straight flight of wasps, whose speed would evidently carry them far, I stuck to my post in hope of killing those in the rear. And when the magazine seemed to have spent itself, I withdrew my suffocator. Except a few that I had crushed in the first quick push, all had escaped. The nest, now a crumpled mass of grubs, fell from its pedicle and rolled down the roof. I seized my putty knife, scraped away the mud by which the stem was fastened, and began to paint. I kept plying the brush rapidly, with the idea of painting myself as far away from that place as possible.

I had not gone far when the wasps began to come back. This time they did not loiter about their home site, now reeking with ammonia from the shingles and newly covered with paint: they lit on the roof near me, and began casting restlessly about. More and more came back; and then they grew more lively in their demeanor. I again went down the ladder.

By a simple process of arithmetic, multiplying the present number of wasps on the roof by eight, I saw what the state of the premises would be if I stirred up all the colonies, and deprived them of their homes. I put the cover on the paint and relegated to the darkness of the cellar the pure Virginia white and the delightful apple green. I did not paint that summer. And now that the place had become so popular, I did not see how I was going to do it any other summer.

III

But I did paint the following spring. And here is where mere book-knowledge finally vindicated itself.

Early in the season — I believe it was in March — I was standing in the sunshine on the south side of the house. The stone wall, two feet thick, was warming up cosily and making a sheltered place in which spring came early. I was not yet thinking of painting: I had not worked up inwardly to that stage of activity. But I quickly thought of painting as a wasp darted along the wall—then another, and another.

Bees and wasps are remarkably alike in some of their arrangements. In both the wasp’s nest and the beehive the population consists of male, female, and neuter — the latter being an incomplete and unfertilized female. Among wasps, as among bees, the males have no sting. So far they are alike. And now come interesting differences.

Among bees, it is only the neuters that work. The colony, as you see it coming and going (twenty to thirty thousand in a hive), consists mostly of spinsters. They are the architects, the food-providers, and the trained nurses who tend the young; and, finally, they are the soldiers, furnishing the prætorian guard which stands watch before the door. The males, or drones, are gentlemen of leisure. They spend the summer of their lives loafing about the place and living upon the common store. They are as lazy and useless as any buck Indian who ever let his womenfolk do all the chores. And they are mostly superfluous — mostly, I say, in view of the fact that there is but one female in the hive for them all to pay attention to. As she is laying eggs from morning till night, — thousands of eggs a day, — and needs but one fertilization in the course of her life, she is too busy to bother about the gentlemen out in front. The female is truly a queen, in the sense that there is but one of her: she will not brook the presence of a rival. The rest attend and cherish her.

Among wasps, all are workers, male, female, and neuter. There is a considerable proportion of females in the colony, and as they take part in the general activity and do not rule in solitary state, they can hardly be called queens. They are simply mother wasps, as distinguished from their unmarriageable sisters, the neuters.

Among bees, when fall comes, the gentlemanly drones fall victims to their theory of life. The old maids fall upon them and kill them all. They do not work; therefore, why should they eat with winter coming on? Now comes that busy scene of killing which was so interesting to Shakespeare, —

Or, as the Archbishop of Canterbury must have delivered it, with his long training in eloquence,—

Those of us who have read this with reconstructive imagination have no doubt formed a vivid mental picture of His Honor the Justice — a sort of drylipped old Yankee, musing over the crime in his dusty court-room and meting out the penalty of the law. This is well and good; but if we are to be modern realists, we should remember that the justice and executioner was really a she. Or, rather, it was a neuter.

Not so with wasps. When fall comes, they all die — all except a few fertilized females. Some of the mothers manage to survive the winter in sheltered retreats; and when the sun comes north again, it is for these few, the all-including survivors of their race, to start the wasp world over again. As the mother wasp is a complete worker, — much more admirable than a queen when you come to know her, — she is able to plaster a pedicle, build paper cells, lay the eggs, and provide meat for the young. And as there would be no advantage in several mothers living together, each starts a colony of her own. Presently, her first few children issue forth; and these start at once to help her. In short, the bees preserve their organization through the winter and the wasps do not.

Unlike the bees, who cling in a cluster and die all together when they are homeless and famished, and have no further object in living, wasps go wandering around at the end of the season, each seeking his way to dusty death. Those of us who have seen a homeless and dying wasp crawling about in the warm kitchen as the summer wanes, must have observed that he has the look of a fated creature. He is a dejected wanderer on the face of Nature — a wasp out of work. He is the Hamlet of the insect world, and he looks the part.

‘What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth?’

Whether wasps all die in the fall because the female in spring will be able to fend for herself; or whether the mother wasp has learned to do it all, because the other workers are dead and she simply has to, might make an interesting and bootless subject of speculation. Such is the delicate balance, the marvelous consistency of nature. One fact fits in with all the other facts.

Something of this occurred to me, as I stood and watched a few wasps veering back and forth along the sunny wall. Then I began to think of painting. And suddenly I saw the point. As it was just at the tail-end of winter, all there were female wasps! If I killed one of them, I would be killing a whole colony. I could exterminate hundreds at a blow. I went right into the house and got the fly-swatter.

I killed a dozen or two — every last mother of them. All that had come out into the sunshine around the premises I killed. And that summer I painted. There were no wasps’ nests that season; no — nor the next season, nor the next.

IV

Then it began to dawn upon me that I had made a great mistake. I had become interested in wasps. From going up the ladder so much that first summer, drawing closer and closer to a nest, I had begun to see things. There was a multitude of plump and hungry grubs, each living like a little papoose in its snugly fitting cell, its brown face always in position for something to eat. And the whole activity of the old ones, as they came and went, was to keep up with this constant demand. When I found I could not paint that summer, — and yet wanted to, — I made repeated excursions up the ladder, and tarried to see what they were doing. As it proved so interesting, I began to take chances in the interest of—not science, but curiosity. I got my nose, as it were, into a wasp’s business. And thereafter, when I came down to the library, it was to make notes. Another summer, I told myself, I would start right in at the beginning and see it all.

But the following season I found that I had made a fatal and lasting mistake. I seemed to have exterminated all the wasps in these immediate parts. I had deprived myself of all material for further study. In two or three years, as these notes turned up again and began to grow interesting, I was sorry I did it. If I had kept on with the same rapt interest in the Social Wasps, there is no telling how much I might have found out on this forbidden subject.

One thing I did find out pretty thoroughly, however, and that is how a wasp comports himself in the bosom of his family. I know little about the wasp afield, how he (or she) pounces upon the prey and dismembers it and sorts out the meat. But I know what he does with it when he gets it home, and how he meets some interesting little problems. My knowledge is not extensive, but intensive. Let us, then, take a close look at a wasp’s nest, noting the rules that they follow in feeding so large a family, and the many little things that make their system perfect.

The colony that we are observing is at the height of the season’s activities, about the middle of July. The nest has now grown to a good size, and all the cells are filled with young wasps in the various stages of development. Some of the cells are sealed, these containing grubs that have been fed until they reached full growth, and then spun a cover over themselves. They will remain quiescent while they take on the nymph form, ready to come forth as wasps.

Around them, and of chief interest to the observer, is a multitude of brownish faces, each face just filling the mouth of the cell. These are the countenances of fat, white grubs, ever hungry and waiting to be fed. They form almost an unbroken surface of faces, separated only by the thin walls of the hexagonal compartments. Toward the rim of the nest, the cells dwindle in size, some nearly completed, some half-built-up, and finally, at the very edge, mere shallow cups. A female wasp does not wait for the cell to be fully built before she deposits her egg. She lays it at once in the rounded bottom. The wasps build as the grub grows and develops.

Turning now to the wasps themselves, who have, in fact, been walking all over the surface of the comb while we were observing it, we naturally expect to see signs of intelligent activity. To our surprise there is not a stroke of useful work being done by the whole restless swarm. There is nothing but walking about and preening and primping, and the everlasting making of their toilet. A wasp — he, she, or it — is never still. When there is nothing else to do, she is at her toilet, stroking her wings with her legs, washing her face like a cat, recomposing and polishing her parts, and cleaning up generally, after the manner of a fly. They never seem to be satisfied. After you have watched such a lot of housekeepers for a while, you begin to wonder what their business is and how they ever get anything done. There seems to be nothing worth observing.

Suddenly, by some instant understanding, a spell falls over the congregation. All activity ceases. There is not a move. Each wasp seems utterly transfixed. As you see this sudden change come over them, and stand wondering what it is all about, you cannot help feeling the suspense in the air. Each wasp is expectant, motionless, wrapped in some impending event.

This means that, somewhere in the distance, another wasp is coming with a load of meat. You might listen with your intentest ear, or look your sharpest, but you could not detect the approach of that other wasp at the time they do.

Presently the forager comes in, like an airship, and lights with his burden on the nest. He has brought home a ball of sausage about the size of a small pea. Sometimes the ball is much smaller; frequently it is as big as the front section of his body, or half as big as himself. The sausage, already chewed up and perfectly rounded in the field, is either of two colors, a dull reddish hue like Bologna or summer sausage, or a greenish tint like Roquefort cheese. Those who have observed this wasp in the field say that it preys upon caterpillars, and this I can well believe. The lighter-colored meat would indicate that he had killed for his children ‘a big, green woolly one.’

As he alights, there is commotion among the wasps, and several draw up closer to him. One stands directly in front of him. And now ensues a peculiar performance with the ball of meat. Resting on the wasp’s extended forelegs, it begins revolving, now toward the right and now toward the left. In the same manner that a man without hands might manage a big ball on his extended arms, the wasp makes the ball of sausage turn over and over. And just as a man might extend his chin out over the ball in order to hold and control it better, so does a wasp. But the wasp does it with the skill of a juggler, and the ball moves briskly round. It is evident that a ball handled in this way, simply by the alternate raising and lowering of two straight arms, has got to move from right to left or left to right. It cannot so readily move in the other direction, to and from the wasp. This will be interesting to remember when we consider the wasp’s use of his cutting instruments.

In a little while, the wasp that has been standing face to face with the forager walks off with a share of the sausage. Rather, I should say that he walks off with the whole ball, except that the forager has retained a small share for himself. This second wasp now starts the ball revolving to right and left, and another wasp takes a position face to face with him, just as he did with the first wasp. Finally, this third wasp receives the ball, the second having retained a share. Thus it passes on, until it has been divided between three or four, or possibly five, wasps.

These wasps are now to distribute it among the young. Each of the pieces will serve to feed several grubs — possibly eight or ten of them. But the wasps do not feed it by any such crude and simple process as giving each grub a bite, or tearing off a piece for it. Each of the feeding wasps stations himself in front of a cell and goes through the same juggling performance with the little ball. It takes quite a while. Meanwhile the hungry grub, whose brown face just fills the opening of the cell, has to wait for its dinner. Presently, by a quick dab, that grub has been fed; and the wasp moves on to another cell, to go through the same performance.

Watching this process closely, we begin to see what is taking place: the wasp is shaping a little round biscuit on the side of the main loaf, almost cutting it off, and yet leaving it securely fastened. It is a ball on the side of a ball. And this little ball is always on the side away from the wasp. It is shaped by the pinching of the wasp’s mandibles.

At this stage of affairs, the wasp ceases his juggling. He grasps the larger ball firmly between his forelegs and presents it to the grub, so that the side with the little biscuit on it is directly in front of the grub’s face. The grub takes hold, the wasp pulls the ball away, the biscuit separates; and so another child has been fed.

The wasp is here solving a problem in baby-feeding incident to a socialistic state of living. It is important that each child of this great multitude receive its share, that one be not gorged while others are famished. The meat must be given to the babies on a set ration, as far as it will go. Therefore, the adult wasp carefully measures off the mouthful that each shall receive. As for the first division of the ball among several adults, that is a division of labor. They are not only social wasps; they are essentially socialist wasps. Without this system, I imagine that many youngsters would try to grab it all, and many oldsters would not do their share of the work.

But this is not to look closely enough. As I have said, the ball has got to revolve from left to right and right to left. And as it is being spun around for the purpose of shaping another little ball on it, the work has all got to be done on one of the poles. This will be the pole away from the wasp, because he hugs it close as it goes round.

For a wasp to reach over a big revolving ball of meat, and keep biting on the pole that is farthest from him, might seem to require a considerable act of contortion. If a wasp had an extensible neck like a bird’s and a bill like a bird’s bill, he would certainly have to put his head in a twisted position, not very convenient to a juggler. And when we consider that a wasp’s head is set directly on his body, with practically no neck at all, it is evident that he must be built in some way that specially fits him for the work to be done. We see this fitness in the way his mandibles work.

A wasp’s mandibles — a big, strong beak, which, after you have looked at it a while, seems as formidable as that of an eagle — do not open with an upand-down motion, like the bill of a bird. His is a bill the two halves of which open out to right and left. And instead of one half moving while the other remains stationary, both move. It works like a pair of pincers. This long and strong cutting tool hangs downward, though not in the sense that it is bent to reach in that direction. A wasp has a long head, like a horse, and the mandibles, being set straight on this, naturally reach downward. Thus, he can work on the far side of his revolving ball, biting as it turns, and cutting off portions with the utmost convenience.

A successful hunter will not always divide his booty with the other wasps. Sometimes he does and sometimes he does not; and as there seemed to be no system or consistency in their practice, they had me puzzled. Watching closely, I discovered the rule that governs. It all depends upon the size of the load. If it is more than the hunter can conveniently handle in feeding the grubs, he will divide; if it is not, he insists upon doing all the feeding himself. If it is twice as much as he can easily juggle, he will divide it in halves, and there an end. If it is three times as much as he wants, he will keep a third for himself, and give two thirds to the wasp before him. This surplus, which is to say the whole ball with the exception of the piece which the hunter retains, always goes round from wasp to wasp, each keeping his portion and passing it on. A wasp that stands face to face with another in making this subdivision, extends his fore-legs also and helps in rotating the ball. The ball at this stage is big and heavy, so that coöperation is welcome. Later, when these wasps have received their shares, they handle them without help, easily and with considerable speed. But if the hunter has brought in a ball that is not too big for him, he will reserve the right of feeding it all himself.

One might suppose that the hunter, having a sense of property rights, would conduct his decision on a different system, giving to another wasp what that wasp could use, cutting off a proper share for the next, and so on, till he had a remainder that suited himself. As we have seen, it is just the other way about.

After more watching and further acquaintance with their problems and difficulties, I saw that this was the rational thing to do.

A wasp, after making a long flight with a heavy load, is very tired; sometimes he is so exhausted that he falls off the nest, sausage and all, and can hardly land the load. You can see him breathing heavily, his hinder parts working up and down. The contrast between his condition and that of the other wasps shows very plainly that he is nearly done for. In this state of affairs, it is quite sensible for the one that has been doing the exhausting work, immediately to pass on the bulk of his burden to another wasp. It is going to take a lot of juggling with that heavy ball to divide it into several parts; and so he helps only with the first division — just long enough to retain his share. It is as if he said, ‘ Here! I’m played out. Take the rest of this and divide it among yourselves.’ The second wasp, though he may not be tired, follows the same rule for subdivision, and passes the bulk of it on.

One morning, when I was watching them, a wasp came in with an unusually large haul. Possibly he had brought it from a great distance. He struck in a blundering manner near the edge of the nest and fell off, landing on the shingles a short distance below. He maintained his hold on the sausage, however, and in a little while he flew away. Why he did not now fly in the direction of the nest I do not know. One might imagine that he was disgusted with the whole performance, and had gone off a distance to get a good flying start. In about half a minute he was back again. This time he did not reach the nest at all, but lit on the roof almost directly under it. It was evident that he was very much exhausted. I could see him pant, his body working like that of a tired bee. After a period of rest, he rose by sheer force of upward flight and landed on the comb. Another wasp immediately met him and started the work of subdividing. I could see no reason for the wasp’s wasting his strength by flying away as he did, nor do I exactly understand the difficulties which kept him from making a landing on the comb, when he could reach the roof directly under it. I mention this as an indication of the effort a wasp has sometimes to exert in bringing home a load of sausage.

It is interesting to note that, in a case like this, where a wasp plainly has more than he can manage, the others do not go out and relieve him of part of the burden. They knew well enough he was coming, as could be seen by their rapt attention while he was yet in the distance; and they could, no doubt, subdivide the burden on the roof as well as on the comb. But this is not according to the abstract rules which govern them. The forager, no matter how many mishaps he may go through, has to deliver his own load. Once he has landed, all are ready to receive a share.

When a wasp has got through forming the little ball on the side of the big one, it is interesting to note the accuracy with which he seizes the larger one, as between two hands, and presents the far side of it, which he cannot see, so that the biscuit is directly in front of the grub. At the beginning of my observations, when I had become pretty well versed in this part of the trade, I thought that the wasp, just as the grub took hold, cut off the biscuit with his own mandibles. Further watching showed me that this could not be the case. When a wasp is just beginning to pass the food around to the grubs, and before it has been reduced in size by several of them receiving their share, the ball of sausage is frequently so large as completely to cover the mouth of the cell as the wasp presses it firmly home against the grub’s face. It fills the opening of the cell like the stopper of a bottle. And when it is drawn away, the little ball or biscuit is gone. This shows conclusively that the grub disattaches the portion, itself. This part is done so quickly, by a mere offhand dab, that you have to watch closely to catch the details. The grub is always prompt enough about taking hold.

As to why the wasp has adopted the system of leaving the grub’s little ball of sausage attached to the big one, not quite cutting it off, the rationale of that is easily apparent. The wasp, having no hands, needs both front legs to hold the main ball. If he were to cut the little ball completely off, he would have two packages to manage — not very convenient in his case. It is better to keep it in one package, and let the grub get hold before the final separation takes place. It is a part of the work that the grub is extremely willing to do.

The reader has no doubt observed that I have said nothing about the wasp’s work as an architect. I do not describe him building up those incomplete paper cells. For this there is no doubt a reason. A wasp, being a paper manufacturer, needs moisture with which to work up the pulp. He gathers the loose fibre from the surface of decaying wood at a time when it is wet with rain. And I did my wasp investigating on fair days. If I had only thought of this, the neighbors would no doubt have seen me up a ladder with an umbrella.

I am now beginning to suspect that my too great success in getting rid of wasps had contributing reasons behind it. That south wall of my house, which is built of boulders two feet thick, has deep interstices, where the mortar did not completely fill in; and while it is thoroughly pointed up on the surface, there are cracks, due to seasoning, which allow access to this ramified interior. Having the heat-retaining properties of stone, and facing the sun in winter, it is a great place for snakes to hibernate — as I find out in spring, when I see them issuing from the ground line where the pointing-up comes to an end. Wasps, the few of them that survive, hibernate too; and they look about for a place with favoring circumstance. I am of the opinion that my place attracted all the mother wasps in this part of the country. And my fly-swatter, making such complete work of them just as they were coming out, gave the species a complete setback.

If I thus robbed myself of a source of intellectual pleasure, I can only say that I deserved what I got. One should not be too reckless about disturbing the balance of nature.