“I’m quite willing they should,” spoke up Mrs. Polistes, a long, slender brown wasp, with a yellow line around her body. “I could wall up my house if I wished to, but I don’t and I won’t; so there.”
“They all have awful tempers, haven’t they?” said Ruth to Mrs. Horntail.
“Tempers?” repeated that lady. “They are perfect pepper pots, though I must say Mrs. Polistes isn’t usually as bad as the others.”
“I am talking,” called the yellow jacket, “and the rest of the audience will please keep still. As I was saying, though I doubt if you all heard it, there are other members of our family who have not been mentioned yet. We have miners, masons, and carpenters just like the bees. Of course they are solitary, and——”
“I object!” interrupted Mrs. Muddauber. “I won’t be bunched in with ever so many others. I will speak for myself.”
She was quite graceful, with a waist as slender as a thread, but she jerked her wings about in such a nervous and fidgety fashion that Mrs. Horntail declared she must have St. Vitus’s dance.
“I haven’t any such thing,” answered Mrs. Muddauber, angrily. “I haven’t any time to dance. I’m nervous, that’s all. Anybody would be nervous with all the work I have to do, and my mate such a lazy fellow that he never thinks of lending me a helping mandible in making my home. He says he doesn’t live very long, and wants to enjoy himself while he can. Speaking of houses, I don’t approve of paper ones. I always make mine of mud. I’m a mason, you see. I get one room finished, and lay an egg in it. Then I go to market to get my baby’s dinner.”
“But you haven’t any baby,” objected Mrs. Horntail. “Your egg doesn’t hatch as soon as it is laid, I know that.”
“What of it? The egg will be a baby sometime, and the baby will be hungry. He will not be a vegetarian either. He will want meat. Juicy spiders are what he prefers, and he likes them fresh. Now if I should kill them they would be anything but fresh when he is ready to eat them, so I merely sting them until they are quite paralyzed, then I put them in the room with my egg and seal it up. I build a number of cells with an egg and spiders in each, but I am not a jug builder. I have no time to fool after such silly affairs as you sometimes see on twigs and bushes.”
“She isn’t artistic enough, she had better say,” remarked the little jug builder. “My nests are wonderfully pretty. I have heard many people say so. I am very careful to give them a delicate shape. I line them with silk too, but I will not tell you how I make this silk. Even the wise men have not discovered our secret.”