On a warm sunny day in spring you may often see one of these bees flying up and down a grassy bank searching for a suitable burrow in which to build. Then you may be quite sure that she is a queen. For among bumblebees the drones and workers die early in the autumn, and only the queens live through the winter.
Solitary bees are very common almost everywhere, and you may find their nests in all sorts of odd places. One kind of solitary bee, for example, builds in empty snail-shells, and another in small hollows like keyholes. A third gnaws out a burrow in the decaying trunk of an old tree, or in the timbers of a barn or house-porch and makes a number of thimble-shaped cells out of little semicircular bits of rose-leaf, which it cuts out with its scissor-like jaws. Haven't you noticed how often the leaves of rose-bushes are chipped round the edges, quite large pieces being frequently cut away? Well, that is the work of the leaf-cutter bee, as this insect is called, and very often not a single leaf on a bush is left untouched.
But the commonest of all the solitary bees burrows into the ground. As you walk along the pathway through a meadow in spring, you may often see a round hole in the ground, just about large enough to admit an ordinary drawing-pencil. That is the entrance to the burrow of a solitary bee; and if you could follow the tunnel down into the ground you would find that it was about eight or ten inches deep, and that at the bottom were four round cells. In each of these cells the bee lays an egg. Then it fills the cells with flies, or spiders, and caterpillars, or beetles, for the little grubs to feed upon when they hatch out. For solitary bees do not nurse their little ones, as social bees do, and feed them several times a day. But at the same time the grubs are quite helpless, and cannot possibly go to look for food for themselves. So the mother bee has to store up sufficient to last them until the time comes for them to spin their cocoons and pass into the chrysalis state. These are only a few examples of a large number of interesting ways in which the solitary bees in various parts of the world provide for their young.
Wasps
Wasps make nests which are almost as wonderful as those of the hive-bee. That of the common yellow-jacket wasp is generally placed in a hole in the ground, or in a cavity under a stone, and is made of a substance very much like coarse paper, which the wasps manufacture by chewing wood into a kind of pulp. You may often see them sitting on a fence, or on the trunk of a dead tree, busily engaged in scraping off shreds of wood for this purpose. When the nest is finished it is often as big as a football, and of very much the same shape; and inside it are several stories, as it were, of cells placed one above another, and supported by little pillars of the same paper-like material. These cells are six-sided, like those of the hive-bee, but they are squared off at the ends, instead of being produced into pointed caps, and they always have their mouths downward. In a large nest there may be several thousands of these cells, and very often three generations of grubs are brought up in them, one after the other.
The hornet, which is really a kind of big wasp, makes its nest in just the same way, but places it on a beam in an out-house, or in a hole which the sparrows have made in the thatched roof of a house, or in a hollow tree, or perhaps hangs it in the open air to the bough of a tree.
Ants
Even more wonderful than bees and wasps are the ants, which sometimes do such extraordinary things that we are almost afraid to tell you about them, for fear that you might not believe us. There are ants, for example, which actually take other ants prisoners and make them act as slaves, forcing them to do all the work of the nest, which they are too lazy to do themselves; and there are ants which keep large armies, sometimes more than one hundred thousand strong; and there are many ants which harvest grain and store it away in underground barns! Many ants, too, keep little beetles in their nests as pets, and fondle and caress them just as one might pat a dog, or stroke a favorite cat. They even allow them to ride on their backs; while, if the nest is opened, the first thing they think of is the safety of their pets which they pick up at once and hide away in some place of safety, even before they carry off their own eggs and young. They also pet tiny crickets and small white wood-lice in just the same way.
Then ants have little "cows" of their own, which they "milk" regularly every day. These are the greenfly or aphis insects which do so much harm in our gardens and fields, plunging their beaks into the tender shoots and fresh green leaves of the plants, and sucking up their sap unceasingly. And as fast as they do so they pour the sap out again through two little tubes in their backs, in the form of a thin, sticky, very sweet liquid which we call honeydew. Now the ants are very fond of this liquid, and if you watch the greenfly insects which are almost always so plentiful on rose-bushes, you may see the ants come and tap them with their feelers. Then the little creatures will pour out a small quantity of honeydew from the tubes on their backs, which the ants will lick up. That is the way in which ants milk their little cows, and they are so fond of the honeydew that they will carry large numbers of these aphides into their nests and keep them, like a herd of cattle, all through the winter, so that they may never be without a supply of their favorite beverage!
Ants, like bees and wasps, almost always consist of drones, queens, and workers. Only the drones and queens have wings, and these are seldom seen until the end of August. But then they make their appearance in vast swarms, which are sometimes so dense that from a little distance the insects really look like a column of smoke. They only take one short flight, however, and when this is over they come down to the ground and snap off their wings close to their bodies, just as termites do.