"The lady then took a pen-knife and scraped away this door to the hole. She then put in a fine crochet-hook, and out tumbled no fewer than fifteen small green living caterpillars. At last, quite at the back of the hole, she found a small oval thing, something like an ant's egg, only more transparent. That was the wasp's egg; and the caterpillars were for its food when it was hatched, which would be in about three weeks."
"Don't wasps make honey?" asked Annie.
"No; the common wasp feeds her very young grubs upon the sweet juice of ripe fruit; in fact they like fruit over-ripe, and that is why they choose plums and pears and peaches that have fallen down to the ground. It is dangerous to eat any ripe fruit that has fallen, without first looking to see if there is a wasp inside it.
"But the young wasps soon want green caterpillars and flies to eat, and many a blue-bottle fly is killed by wasps."
"If wasps don't store up honey for the winter, what do they live upon when there are no insects about?" asked Mary.
"When the fruit is all gone, and the nights get cold, about the beginning of October, then some instinct tells them what to do, for only a few of them live through the winter.
"The wasps cease to bring in any more food for the young. They tear open the cells and expose the young grubs to the weather, when they die, or the birds eat them. Generally they pinch them to death, for they will not let them live to die of starvation; and while they are in this state they do not feel pain. So what looks like cruelty is really kindness.
"The full-grown wasps soon become sleepy with cold and die off, all but the few which live to be the mothers of the wasps next year."