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
"I could not find either flies or spiders for the babies, and even if
there had been a few about I could not have used them, as there was no
worker wasp to chew them soft and fine for them. So I made a nice,
appetizing syrup of sugar and water, and found that young wasps were as
eager for sweets as little children are. They worked their baby mouths
busily as long as I had the patience to feed them. When the Vespa family
are grown up they eat honey dew from the little aphids, fruit juice, and
the nectar from flowers, or, if fortune favors them, they may gain
entrance to Mrs. Honey-Bee's home, and feast from her well-filled
honeycombs. But the babies all eat insects which their mothers put in
the little rooms beside the eggs.
"Mrs. Polistes is a cousin of Mrs. Vespa. She is long and slender, while
Mrs. Vespa is rather broad. Her house is a much simpler affair. It has
just one layer of rooms suspended by a stem from the under side of a
porch, or maybe the eaves, of a house."
"Are there solitary wasps," asked Jimmie, "just as there are solitary
bees?"
"Many wasps prefer to live alone rather than in a big house with
hundreds of others. They are like bees in their cleverness, knowing how
to tunnel in wood, dig deep pits in the ground, or make nests of mud.
Mr. Kellogg, a very wise man, and young to be so wise, tells of one
interesting little wasp, called the thread-waisted sand-digger, which
lives in California in the salt-marshes. These marshes are covered by
plants, but in between are little smooth places covered with a
glistening crust of salt. It is in these open spots that Mrs.
Sand-Digger makes her home. She has strong jaws, and with these she cuts
out a neat little circle of salty crust. Then she begins to dig a
tunnel, humming away to herself all the time. After the hole is ready
she very carefully backs out of it and puts a circular door on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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