If you have the hardihood to stand quite close to one of these nests you will see the grubs with hungry-looking mouths, wiggling and stretching out their necks, each in a cell quite open to the air, waiting to be fed by its sister or the queen. As to which will come forth from these white grubs as queens, which as males, and which are doomed to be but workers—undeveloped females—nobody can foretell, but certain it is that there will be all three of these forms represented.
A MUD DAUBER WASP
(Sceliphron cementarium, Klug)
Think of all the marvelous mechanism and chemistry required in order that a wasp may feed its young upon fresh meat!
The solitary wasps have stings whose venom is much less powerful than that of the bees. Fabre declares that his experiments convince him that the reason may lie in the fact that for paralyzing its prey the wasp needs only a weak poison whereas when the bee stings it does so in self-defense and it stings to kill.
The busy mud dauber females build their nests of mud brought from the nearest puddle and in each carefully made cell lay an egg and around it pack the paralyzed insects on which the voracious little grubs begin to feed as soon as they hatch out.
By the time the young grubs have eaten up the food that has been so thoughtfully supplied by their parents and have changed from grub to pupa and emerged as flying, stinging wasps, their parents are dead and gone. Imagine, if you can, a civilization in which the mothers slave for offspring which they never see, and the children grow up with no education, yet possessed of all the knowledge that their parents had. As Sharpe remarks, the solitary wasps are among the most instinctive creatures of the animal kingdom.