THE YELLOW WASP 



RICHARD JEFFERIES used to say that though our swallow does 

 not make a spring, our wasp does make a summer. Perhaps 

 we do think of the wasp as essentially a thing of summer ; 

 but the queens will emerge in any month, even in January 

 within the house, and the garden is sometimes full of queens 

 long before spring is over. Some particular flower or bulb 

 will lure them long before a true summer date. In one 

 Hertfordshire garden it is a virtual certainty that queens will 

 be gnawing wood on a certain cotoneaster, which is trained 

 against a south wall, long before May is out. But perhaps 

 Jefferies meant not the queen but the common wasp or 

 neuter worker, which is certainly one of the least fallible of 

 all signs of a particular date in advanced summer. 



More than this the wasp in her very colour suggests hot 

 days, and yellow pollen, and ripening fruit, and the noise of 

 the summer hum over the grass-heads. 



The wasp nevertheless is not welcomed even as an 

 earnest of hot weather. But even that really terrible 

 creature, in guise and bearing, the rare super- wasp, which we 

 know as a hornet, is not altogether unlovely. A true tale of 

 an individual hornet's cleverness and persistence may serve 



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