Wasps, Social and Solitary

Chapter I. Communal Life

COMMUNAL LIFE

“For where’s the state beneath the firmament That doth excel the wasps’ for government.”

“What is not good for the swarm is not good for the wasp.”

AS the tendency of mankind to crowd into towns grows stronger the joys of country life and the workings of Nature are more and more excluded from the daily experience of humanity. In a few the primal love of the wild is too strong for suppression, and turning from the hot and noisy streets they find it a refreshment of spirit to meet our little brothers of earth and air in the wider spaces of their own territory.

We were walking through the woods one hot day in the middle of August when our attention was attracted by a stream of yellow–jackets issuing from the ground. They came in such surprising numbers and looked so full of energy that we stopped to watch them, and this was our introduction to the study of these “bold sons of air and heat,” although a perusal of Fabre’s fascinating “Souvenirs Entomologiques” had prepared us to feel a lively interest in them. We were at our summer home near Milwaukee, where meadow and garden, with the wooded island in the lake close by, offered themselves as hunting grounds, while wasps of every kind, the socialistic tribes as well as the extreme individualists of the solitary species, were waiting to be studied.

The Vespas that had aroused our interest received our first attention, and a nest in the ground proved to be a most convenient arrangement. Experiments that would have been dangerous to life and limb had we tried them with a paper nest hanging in the open, were easy here so long as we kept calm and unflurried. Intent upon their own affairs, and unsuspicious of evil, perhaps because they knew themselves to be armed against aggression, they accepted our presence, at first with indifference; but as we sat there day after day we must have become landmarks to them, and perhaps before the summer was over they considered us really a part of home.

While poor humanity takes comfort in a mid–day siesta, wasps love the heat of noontide, and with every rise in temperature they fly faster, hum louder, and rejoice more and more in the fullness of life. The entrance to the Vespa nest was but an inch across; and once when they were going in and out in a hurrying throng, jostling each other in their eagerness, we counted the number that passed, one taking the entrances and one the exits. In ten minutes five hundred and ninety–two left the nest and two hundred and forty–seven went in, so that we saw eight hundred and thirty–nine or about eighty to the minute. This must be a strong swarm, wonderful indeed when we thought that it had all come from a single queen mother. We imagined how she had made an early start, digging a hole in the ground, building within it a paper comb with five or six cells around a central column, and laying therein some neuter eggs; how she had then spent a month in attending carefully to the beginnings of things, feeding the young larvæ as they hatched, and watching over them through their childhood and youth; and then how her solicitude was rewarded by the filial devotion with which this first set of workers took upon themselves the labor of excavating, building, and feeding the young, everything indeed except the egg–laying. These queens, surrounded though they are by respectful and attentive subjects, have much the worst of it in our estimation, never going out, and passing their lives in a dull routine. Through the early summer only neuters are produced, but when fall approaches the future generation is provided for by the development of males and females. The activity of the little colony is limited by the season, for as the days grow colder the males and females leave the nest and mate, and a little later both males and workers lose ambition, become inactive and finally die, while the queens hide away in protected corners to reappear in the spring. The eggs and larvæ, left unfed and uncared for, become a prey to moulds and to hordes of insects, and thus the swarm comes to an end.

We had once made some not very successful attempts to find out whether spiders had a sense of color; and seeing that the conditions were much more favorable with our present subjects, we thought it would be a good plan to test their knowledge of the spectrum. Providing six sheets of stiff paper two feet square, colored respectively red, blue, green, pink, and two shades of yellow, and cutting a circular hole four and one half inches in diameter in the centre of each, we began our experiments by placing the red paper over the nest so that the entrance was clearly exposed. The outgoing wasps dashed upward without noticing it, but great was the confusion among the homecomers. Thrown out of their reckoning, they clamored about us in ever increasing swarms. Like Homer’s wasps,

“All rise in arms and with a general cry Assert their domes and buzzing progeny,”

and a crisis (for us) was approaching, when one, a pioneer of thought, determined to go into the hole, which did not look like the right hole, although it was where the right hole ought to be; and so potent is example that one by one the others followed. Three hours later they had become accustomed to the change, and went in and out as usual.

They had noticed the paper; that was plain enough, but did they notice the redness? To test this, we left things as they were for two days, and then substituted blue paper for the red. Again the confusion, the swarming of fervent legions, the noisy expostulations, the descent of one after another; but this time they settled down to their ordinary routine in a little more than two hours. On the following day we removed the blue paper, leaving the grass around the nest exposed; and this proved a new source of mystification, but not so serious as the others. At the end of an hour twenty–five or thirty were still buzzing about, needing the guidance of the blue paper to get inside, and entering at once when it was replaced. As we tried new colors from day to day a few of the wasps became entirely reconciled to our interference, and paid no attention to the changes, while the others grew more or less accustomed to the idea of mutability, and were but little disturbed, although they still showed their consciousness of each alteration by making a few circles before going in. We once placed some dark red nasturtiums on light yellow paper near the nest, and found that more than one third of the homecoming wasps flew to them and hovered over them before entering. When light yellow nasturtiums, nearly matching the paper in color, were substituted, only one out of thirty–six noticed them; and as the odor was as strong in one case as the other, it would seem that the color was the attracting force.

Our final color experiment was to let the blue paper remain for a day or two, giving time for all the wasps to become familiar with it, and then to leave it on the ground a foot and a half away, while replacing it with yellow. This gave a false nest surrounded by the color that they had been associating with the entrance, and a true nest surrounded by a new color. In the next ten minutes two hundred and seventy wasps came home, and every one of them went to the false nest. Many circled above it, others entered the hole in the paper, and some began to excavate, and made quite a depression in the ground; but gradually they found their way home. Three hours later seventy–six wasps entered the false nest in five minutes, and at evening they were still visiting it in goodly numbers; but on the next day we saw only two that were deceived.

On successive days we substituted red for yellow, green for red, and so on, always with similar results, although the wasps became more and more accustomed to the vicissitudes of their life, and after a time seemed to look for the hole itself without relying upon the color to guide them. They found their nest under a color new to them much more readily than when the paper was taken entirely away and the ground left exposed. Once when the green paper was around their nest, and the wind blew it over the hole so that they could not enter, at least one hundred collected, many of them settling in the false nest; when we lifted the green paper, leaving the hole free, only three or four entered, but when we put it back in place they rushed in six or seven at a time. It was plainly the color that directed them.

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