Inmates of My House and Garden

by Mrs. Brightwen

This wasp stores up grey caterpillars for its young as the mason bees do, so we see that they have their use in tending to reduce the number of larvæ which prey upon our vegetables, and should be protected on that account.

An old silver-fir at the Grove, which had become decayed in the centre, became a home for countless thousands of a small species of wasp; they scooped it into endless galleries and cells, and filled them with half-dead bluebottles and other flies to serve as food for their grubs.

I sat and watched them at work for half an hour one day, and saw that about every half-minute a wasp arrived, each one holding some kind of fly in its mandibles; as I imagine this went on from early morning till dusk we may easily reply to the frequent inquiry of, What use can wasps be in the world? and why were such troublesome insects created? by pointing to the useful labours of this despised creature in reducing, not only the destructive grey caterpillars which abound in our gardens, but also the swarms of flies which beset us in the summer months.

We had to take down this great fir-tree, as it was completely decayed and likely to fall with the next high wind, and when it was felled we saw the marvellous work the wasps had been carrying on—the stem was completely honeycombed with wasp-cells and all through that summer endless numbers of wasps continued to hatch out of the old tree-stem.

The mason wasps are a very serious evil in Florida and many other hot countries, because of their tendency to fill up every convenient crevice with their mud nests. For instance, a gun may be laid aside for a day or two without a cover, and a mason wasp will at once fill up the barrel with mud, and when the owner, all unsuspectingly, puts in the cartridge and attempts to fire the gun, it will probably explode, and possibly cause the death of the sportsman. Many a lock is rendered useless, and all kind of domestic troubles are caused by this persevering insect.

I may here say a word about the wasps I have had to deal with in Switzerland. I used often to find their pretty little nests, about the size of a small rose, made of a grey papery material, fixed on various objects, frequently on stones by the roadside, on tree-branches, or on the walls of houses and churches.

I brought one home and placed it in a sunny window of the hotel we were staying at. I had not noticed that the cells were full of young grubs, and one morning we came down to find the room full of lively young wasps which had hatched out of my nest, and we had to set to work and clear them away before we could eat our breakfast in peace. A friend has kindly lent me a somewhat similar nest she found on some heather in England.

I have now spoken of a few of our most common Solitary bees and wasps. There are hundreds of species, so that it is a wide subject and might be indefinitely extended.

If any young people desire to study these curious insects, I may mention a book which will be found very useful for identifying the species: “British Bees,” by W. E. Shuckard, published by Lovell Reeve & Co.

With a magnifying glass one may see the two kinds of eyes with which bees are furnished. The two large eyes with hundreds of facets which we can easily see, are supposed to be for discerning objects near at hand. Then on the top of the bee’s head are three little specks of eyes called “ocelli,” placed in a triangle; these are believed to be for long vision, to enable the bee to guide its flight in the air.