ENEMIES AND THEIR INFLUENCE. 



381 



Goethe 

 on Robber 

 Wasps. 



conditions, and many as had been my inducements to do so, an excessive 

 aversion from all Inns had, nevertheless, been instilled into me by my 

 father. This feeling had rooted itself firmly in him on his trav- 

 els through Italy, France, and Germany. Although he seldom 

 spoke in images, and onl}' called them to liis aid when he was 

 very cheerful, yet he used often to repeat that he always fancied 

 he saw a great cobweb spun across the gate of an Inn so ingeniously 

 that the insects could indeed Hy in, but that even the privileged wasp 

 could not fl}' out again uniilucked." But the number of those who, hav- 

 ing observed the scathless incursions of "the privileged wasp" into cob- 

 web domains, also know the purpose thereof, is exceedingly small. Yet it 

 is inspired by one of the most common and interesting instincts in tlie 

 insect world. 



If we follow the wasp a little space backward from her cobwel) raid, we 

 shall see her fluttering over the muddy margin of pond, puddle, or stream. 

 She is seeking mortar, which, gathered between her mandibles, she carries 

 away through the air. Following her flight, we find her engaged upon the 

 broken face of a cliff, the rugose surface of a wall, or the rough boards 

 or beams in angle or cornice of some house, stable, or 

 outbuilding. She carefully spreads her mortar, smooths 

 it, rounds and arches it, until, after many successive 

 visits to the mud bed, she has built a cell about an 

 inch long and three-eighths to half an inch thick. 

 (Fig. 323.) The middle of this cell is a hollow cylinder, 

 within which the mother wasp, for such the little ma- 

 son is, deposits a single egg. It is at this point that 

 the raids upon spider webs begin. The egg in course 

 of time is to become a ravenous, flesh eating worm, an 

 arachnophagous larva ; a soft, legless, whitish maggot, 

 with a .somewhat horny head and a strong pair of 

 jaws, but no other weapons whatever. The food which 

 Nature foreordains for it is living spiders, and those spiders the mother 

 proceeds to capture and entomb within her mud daub nurserj'. On this 

 errand slie may be seen hawking over and near cobwebs of various sorts, 

 venturing within the meshed and beaded snares that prove fatal to most 

 incomers, and sometimes even to herself. She rarely fails in her errand. 

 If the aranead occupant, expectant of prey, sallies forth to seize the in- 

 truder, it finds itself a cajative, not a captor. For the wasp shakes the 

 silken filaments from feet and wings, turns upon the spider, seizes and 

 stings it, bears it to her cell, and thrusts it therein. 



She does not limit her hawking to cobwebs, but flutters over flowers, 

 burrows among leaves, creeps with nervous, twitching tread along branches 

 of trees, wherever spiders dwell or hunt, and with relentless cunning, zeal, 

 and ferocity snatches those creatures away to add to the growing store 



Fig. 323. The nidus of 

 the mud dauber wasp. 



