

THE MEMBRANE-WINGED, WASPS 

 AND SUCH. 



OTHER kinds of insects than the hymenopters, or mem- 

 brane-winged, possess a certain melancholy interest be- 

 cause of their intimate relations to us and what we eat and 

 wear. They may partake of our blood and our food and 

 live in our houses, but they do not partake of our nature. 

 When, ho\vever, we come to the consideration of wasps, 

 bees, ants, and such, we feel a sense of kinship, for these 

 are the men of the six-legged world. They are all nice, 

 clean, intelligent people, and though we may feel fear of 

 them and the way they can bite and sting, we do not 

 loathe them. They have so much sense, particularly the 

 social kinds; and even if the ant does seem a rattle- 

 brained, fussy creature, invariably going the wrong way 

 and climbing over things that it could far more easily go 

 around, it probably isn't because it doesn't know better, 

 but because it cannot see better. In no other way can 1 

 account for the fact that when Sir John Lubbock laid a 

 paper-strip path from an ants' nest to a place where he had 

 put their pupae, so that they could either walk nine feet 

 to get home or drop down half an inch, they preferred 

 the walk. They went to the edge and looked over, but 

 they feared the jump, and it never occurred to them to 

 heap earth up so as to make an embankment on which to 

 climb and so save a long trudge. Bees, though quite as 

 intelligent as they need to be, were shown by the same 



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