278 SUMMER 



summer to pick what was once a fruit and find it a barren 

 chamber, full of heavy and ugly creatures, stupid with the 

 excess of what they have eaten. They fall to the ground as if 

 wingless, and crawl and tumble there helplessly. The instinct 

 of the preservation of the race has abandoned them, and they 

 eat till they die, often never again returning to the hive. But 

 this phase, which is only a partial phase, is of a later date. 



Generally, from the point of view of an observer, there is 

 no creature who, may one say, gives you more for your 

 money than the wasp ? The more you watch hive-bees the 

 deeper you are plunged into the abysses of a splendid self- 

 sacrificing, almost intellectual socialism ; but everything is at 

 this stage in the insects' development cruelly accurate and 

 mechanical. The wasp is above all things adaptable. With 

 every experiment you evoke new arts ; and, experto crede, the 

 wasp is the less angry and venomous of the two insects. 



A description of many hours of observation spent lying 

 down on the side of a hot bank in August will disclose some 

 of the secrets of the wasp's art, of which little can be found 

 in any text-book. The nest was made in a favourite site on 

 the side of a bank. A mouse had made a hole there in the 

 winter, when food was scarce, in order to get at the bulb of a 

 daffodil. Such was the inference from the state of the bulb 

 when found afterwards behind the nest. A terrier in pursuit 

 of the mouse, which it scented only less cleverly than the 

 mouse scented the bulb, had considerably enlarged the hole 

 one winter day. In May a queen wasp, driven by the 

 sense of her own fertility, adopted the hole, cleaned it up 

 a little, made her paper cells, laid the first eggs, fed the 

 grubs, and in due time the workers coming out to help her 

 a very large nest with four big layers of cells came into being. 



On first watching, at the time when the nest was already 

 big though not at its biggest, the outstanding fact was the 



