There is no wild creature in the northern United States that a man will run away from so fast as from a bald-faced hornet.
At the tip of her flexible armor-plated abdomen is the poison-fed stiletto with which she drives off enemies from the nest or paralyzes her prey.
Her six powerful legs are spined to help her, no doubt, in climbing over the smooth surfaces of flowers and twigs. She has two kinds of eyes—three lens-shaped ones on top of her head and two marvelous compound ones composed of hundreds of little lenses, which take up half the head. Just what she uses each kind for is still unknown.
From her forehead hang ringed antennæ, which doubtless are the organs with which she scents the presence of her prey, and they may also help her find her way about.
Her massive jaws lie below her eyes and look like shears with jagged edges; they are meant for crushing, not for grinding, and with these she tears to pieces bits of wood and cements the particles together with the sticky secretion of her salivary glands, making thus the combs and shelter of her wood-pulp paper nest.
She is an undeveloped female, but with the professional care of a baby’s nurse she tends her sister hornets in the nest. On the wing, from daylight to dark, she scours the country for the flies and other insects with which to feed the young. Of all the fly-destroyers which frequent the house she is perhaps the most efficient, pouncing upon the flies with murderous voracity, tearing off their heads and legs and wings, and macerating their bodies to a pulp to feed the hungry grub-like baby hornets which are hatching out in the paper nest over the front door. Her life, and the life of every other worker, is ended by the autumn, and it is left to a few of the young queens to carry on the species.
Does this picture represent, I wonder, one of the nightmare visions which haunt the dreams of baby flies?
