112 WASPS. 



The enormous excess of Wasp presence above the average was in 

 many places nothing short of a calamity, inflicting pain, and to some 

 degree danger to ourselves, and to horses exposed to sudden attack, 

 and great loss to fruit growers. 



Within our houses, in many cases, the Wasps swarmed to such a 

 degree, and especially at meal times, as to make their presence on the 

 food a real trouble ; the agricultural or garden labourers were severely 

 stung where workiug on crops to which the Wasps had been attracted 

 by presence of Aphides, as in Bean fields, or on fruit stocks, where 

 budding was going forward. Also pain, risk, and delay in farm work, 

 were caused by fierce onslaughts of Wasps from nests turned up in 

 ploughing. Great losses were caused by the quantity of fruit entirely 

 ruined up to almost wholesale destruction in the grounds of large fruit 

 growers, and to this must be added losses to shop-owners dealing in 

 such commodities as find favour in the eyes of the Wasps for their own 

 consumption, or thievish abstraction for food of the coming on 

 generation still in maggot condition, to be counted by hundreds, in 

 each of the vast number of nests which were the head-quarters of the 

 marauding and troublesome pests. 



The question was frequently asked, — What was the cause of such 

 an unusual visitation ? and there appears no reason to doubt that the 

 exceptional numbers were a consequence of the exceptionally favourable 

 circumstances for Wasp life which was supplied by the early and long 

 continued dry weather of the spring. Thus there were not the usually 

 returning intervals of cold and wet to catch and destroy the queen 

 Wasps when warmed into active life, and drawn out from their winter 

 shelters by what, in most years, is an alternation of sunshine, with 

 weather that leaves the houseless queens between whiles (and much to 

 our benefit) exposed to just the conditions unfavourable to their own 

 existence, and likewise to that of their embryo nests. Where these 

 most fragile structures of just a cap of paper-like material, perhaps 

 not an inch across, with a few eggs or maggots, as yet not sheltered 

 around from inclement weather influences, are exposed to all the 

 varieties of temperature and circumstances customary in March and 

 April, we have a most serviceable preventive condition, which was not 

 the case in the long settled drought of last spring, and of which we 

 saw the consequences. 



Before going on to the reports of the year, it may be of service to 

 give as shortly as possible an account of the ordinary method of Wasp 

 life in this country. That is, the history of the Wasp colonies from 

 their rise, by the work of a single female in early spring, through the 

 increase of tenants during the summer, up to many hundreds, or a few 

 thousands, and the coincident enlargement of the paper nests, on to 

 the decay and desertion of these nests in the autumn, when all that 



