THE QUEEN HORNET
(Vespula maculata, Linn.)
The summer was over but the cold weather had scarcely begun when I found this creature under a rotten log in the pasture. The paper nest over the front door was empty and rapidly falling to pieces, but even so, it was hard to believe that the active, dangerous creatures we had watched for so many weeks had suddenly disappeared, and that, of the whole busy colony, only a few females were left.
There is something fascinating in the picture of the young queen hornet, after mating is over and all her relatives are dead, crawling away beneath some log and passing there the long cold winter. Then, when spring has come, she emerges from her sleep, the only survivor of her race, and builds, unaided even by her mate, the beginning of a nest just large enough to hold her first-laid eggs. From these hatch out the grubs, which later, after days of feeding, emerge as workers, undeveloped females, and help build up around her a colony of hundreds of busy hornets.
The death of the wasp and hornet workers does not seem to be a matter of cold alone, for, in the regions of perpetual summer, the workers of many species live short lives. They feel the cold, of course, as all our insects do, and inside the nest, on the shelves formed by the flat tops of the combs where the larvæ live, they find dry roosting places at night. The heat of their own bodies materially raises the temperature inside the nest.
Though many people think them just alike, the bees and wasps (the hornet is a kind of wasp) are very different creatures. The wasps have trim, slender forms with a few scattered hairs upon their bodies, whereas the bees are generally hairy and short bodied. They both build combs, but the wasps make theirs of paper wetted with saliva, while the bees build theirs of wax secreted from their bodies. The wasps depend upon fresh food gathered in the day’s hunt through the air, whereas the bees store up their food in empty cells. The wasps’ nests are the wigwams of a season, the bees’ hives the more permanent abodes of a higher type of social beings.
THE YELLOW JACKET