Little Busybodies: The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other BusybodiesMarks, Jeannette Augustus
Science
Little Busybodies: The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies
Marks, Jeannette Augustus
Insects -- Juvenile literature
"Early in the spring Mrs. Vespa-Wasp, who has been passing the cold
winter days tucked away in a warm crevice somewhere, comes out and finds
a site for her summer home. She begins this as a very small and simple
one, starting with just a few rooms fastened to the branch of a tree.
Here she lays an egg in each little room, then brings in food for the
new baby wasps which are in the making. The kind of food which is stored
away depends upon the kind of wasps. Some like beetles, some spiders,
some caterpillars, and others grasshoppers and cicadas.
"As in the bee family, the first children are all workers, because Mrs.
Vespa-Wasp needs assistance in building up the home and feeding the
children. This first home is small, not nearly large enough for the
growing family, so new rooms must be built at once. These are added on
to the first ones until there is a good-sized layer of them. If Mrs.
Wasp should go on making this upper story larger and larger, it would be
buffeted about by the wind and rain, and perhaps broken. So the family
starts a second story under the first. On the under side of the top
floor some of the cells are broken away and a stem is made to start the
next floor, and so on, until there are four or five combs in the house.
They are always building the house over, tearing down the walls to make
room for new floors; but this does not make the house unsafe in the mean
time, as the walls are not connected with the floors, but form a loose
envelope about them.
"Later in the season, after the family has become very large, some of
the upper cells are torn out, making a nice, warm attic, where the
family may go to keep out of the wind and rain. They dislike the cold
and wet very much.
"I carried this big house to my cabin with me, so that I might look it
over and see just how it was arranged. Very carefully I cut away a
little of the outer wall until I had a place large enough to look
through. Guess what I saw lying cuddled down in many of these rooms?
Little, soft, white baby wasps. When the Vespa family are grown up they
are called hornets, and Peter and Tom know how hornets sting! I was not
afraid of the babies, but was not sure that all the old wasps were out.
It was a cold day, and wasps get stiff very quickly, so I watched
carefully to see whether the warm air of the room would not limber up
some stiff joints which were perhaps in hiding up-stairs in the house.
Sure enough, in a few moments out crawled a worker, looking quite dazed
and sheepish at the change in temperature. I did not wait for it to
become thoroughly awake, but picked it up with the forceps and put it
out of the window. I was kept busy, for twenty-five old fellows walked
out, thinking, no doubt, that they had made a mistake in the season, and
that it was not time, after all, for them to die. All the wasp family,
except the queens, expect to die, and do die in the autumn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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