Wasps, Social and SolitaryPeckham, George W. (George Williams)
Science
Wasps, Social and Solitary
Peckham, George W. (George Williams)
Wasps
We now began to make notes as to the length of time that it took her
to go down and bring back her load. We timed her again and again, and
found that she was remarkably regular, each of her trips occupying from
forty–five to fifty seconds.
All that day we kept her under strict surveillance, and never once did
she suspend her operations either for rest or refreshment. Late in the
afternoon, while we sat watching her as she appeared and disappeared
with almost the regularity of clockwork, we found it difficult to
realize that the patient little creature had been at work for more than
twenty–four hours, with only one brief intermission. Without hurry or
flurry she kept at her task, reminding us, in her business–like ways,
of the social wasps of the genus Vespa. When we left her, at dusk, we
attached the recording tube to the stem, and at ten o’clock in the
evening we found that she had not stopped working. We emptied the
glass, and left her.
At seven o’clock in the morning of July twenty–ninth we paid her a
visit, and could scarcely believe the testimony of our senses when we
saw that the record was one of unceasing toil through the long hours
of the second night. We began to wonder if she would ever finish her
task. Wonderful though she was, we had grown a little weary of our
long session of watching. We had been glad that she worked through the
first night; it was creditable to her and interesting to us, and we
admired her even more for sticking to it through the second, but when
it looked as though we might have to remain by her side through another
long day, watching an endless series of loads as they were carried out,
we confess that we thought she was rather overdoing it. Gradually,
however, she slowed up her work, taking two or three minutes to make a
journey down and up. At last, at just nine o’clock, her head appeared
at the top of the stalk, and after a slight hesitation she flew away.
The nest was completed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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