I can understand the disappearance of the males. These are henceforth useless; the pairing has taken place and the eggs are fertile. I can less easily explain the death of the neuters, who, on the return of spring, would be of such great assistance when new colonies are founded. What I do not understand at all is the death of the females. I had nearly a hundred; and not one has survived the first few days of the new year. Having left their nymphal cells in October and November, they still possessed the vigorous attributes of youth; they represented the future; yet this sacred quality of prospective [[268]]motherhood has not saved them. Even as the feeble males retired from business, even as the workers exhausted by labour, they too have succumbed.
We must not blame their internment under wire for their death. The same thing happens in the open country. The various nests inspected at the end of December all reveal a similar mortality. The females die almost as rapidly as the rest of the population.
This was to be expected. The number of females who are daughters of the same nest is unknown to me. However, the profusion of their dead bodies in the charnel-pit of the colony tells me that they must be counted by the hundred, perhaps by the thousand. One female is enough to found a city of thirty thousand inhabitants. If all were to prosper, what a scourge! The Wasps would tyrannize over the country-side.
The order of things demands that the vast majority shall die, killed not by an accidental epidemic and the inclemency of the season, but by an inevitable destiny, which performs its work of destruction with the same energy as that which it displays in the task of procreation. One question thereupon arises: since a single female, preserved in [[269]]one way or another, is enough to maintain the species, why does a Wasps’-nest contain so many aspirant mothers? Why a multitude in place of one? Why so many victims? A perturbing problem, in which our intelligence fails to see its way. [[270]]
[1] Cf. The Life of the Grasshopper: chaps. xiv. and xvi.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] John James Audubon (1780–1851), a noted American ornithologist of French descent, author of The Birds of America, which was published by subscription (1827–1830) at $1,000 a copy.—Translator’s Note. [↑]