272 WASPS 



'Horrid beast!' 'Oh, do kill it!' 'Oh the brute, it's 

 coming at me I' and so on. A panther escaped from a 

 travelling menagerie could hardly cause more dire com- 

 motion, and peace is restored only by the immolation of 

 the intruder on the brink of the strawberry jam. 



Yet, come what may, I will own up to a warm, though 

 hitherto clandestine, affection for these cleanly, sprightly, 

 valorous insects. To most of us, a wasp is but a wasp, a 

 creature of unmitigated malignity, with two business ends, 

 one for stinging, the other for ruining fruit. Few persons 

 suspect that the recognised species of wasps solitary, 

 social, and fossorial are already numbered by thousands, 

 and probably as many more await recognition in remote 

 parts of the earth. Many of them perform beneficent 

 service by the havoc they work among caterpillars and 

 destructive grubs; all of them rival the much-praised 

 honey-bee in the virtues of industry and parental solici- 

 tude. 



Of social wasps alone we have eight species in the 

 British Isles, whereof three build subterranean nests, 

 three hang them from branches, while the justly-dreaded 

 hornet builds his house upon the ground. All social 

 wasps conform to the rules of apian architecture in build- 

 ing hexagonal cells for their young; but whereas the 

 honey-bee secretes wax for building material, wasps can 

 only provide a kind of cement with which they fashion 

 shredded vegetable fibre into a beautiful kind of papier- 

 mache. None of our native wasps store honey, nor, 

 luckily, do they swarm like bees, though some exotic 

 species do both. It is the queen wasp alone that, having 

 survived the winter, which destroys all her lovers of the 

 previous autumn, founds the nest single-handed; nor 



