Wildwood Ways

by Winthrop Packard

He never bothered me or anyone else. He had no time for men; the capture of house-flies was his vocation and it demanded all his energy and attention. In fact that he might succeed it was necessary that he should put his whole soul into earnest endeavor, for he was not particularly well equipped for his work. He had neither speed nor agility as compared with his quarry, and if house-flies can hear and know what is after them, the roar of his machinery, even at slowest speed, must have given them ample warning. It was like a freighter seeking to capture torpedo boats. They could turn in a circle of a third the radius of his and could fly three miles to his one, yet he was never a minute in getting one.

I think they simply took him for an enlarged edition of their own kind and never knew the difference until his mandibles gripped them. He used to go bumbling and butting about the tent in a near-sighted excitement that was humorous to the onlooker. He didn’t know a fly from a hole in the tentpole, and there was a tack in the ridgepole whose head he captured in exultation and let go in a sort of slow wonder every time he came in. He got to know me as part of the scenery and didn’t mind lighting on top of my head in his quest, and he never thought of stinging me. I timed his visits one sunny, still day and found that he arrived once in forty seconds. But this was only under most favorable weather conditions. A cloud over the sun delayed him and in wet weather he was never to be seen.

His method with the fly in hand was direct and effective. The first buzz was followed by the snip-snip of his shear-like maxillaries. You could hear the sound and immediately see the gauzy wings flutter slowly to the tent floor. If the fly kicked much his legs went in the same way. Then white-face took a firmer grip on his prize and was off with him to the nest. The bee line is spoken of as a model of mathematical directness, but the laden bee seeking the hive makes no straighter course than did my hornet to his nest in the berry bush down in the pasture.

Flies were plentiful and, knowing how many hornets there are in a nest, I expected at first that he would bring companions and perhaps overwhelm my hospitality with mere numbers, but he did nothing of the kind. I have an idea that he was detailed to the fly catching work just as other workers were busy gathering nectar and honey dew for the young and others still were nest and comb building. Later in the summer another did come, but I am convinced that he happened on the other’s game preserve by accident and was not invited. The two between them must have captured thousands of flies and carried them off alive to their nest.

Thus their paper fort, hung from the twigs of a blueberry bush, had by September grown to the dimensions of a water-bucket and contained a prodigious

Their paper fort had by September grown to the dimensions of a water-bucket and contained a prodigious swarm of valiant fighters

swarm of valiant fighters and mighty laborers, so much will persistent labor, even by near-sighted, dunder-headed hornets, accomplish. I say near-sighted, for the two specimens of Vespa maculata who used to hunt flies in my tent were certainly that. I say also dunder-headed, for if not that they would have learned eventually the location of that tack head and ceased to capture it. Barring these failings, no doubt congenital, I know of no pasture people who show greater virtues or more of them than the white-faced hornets.

The weak beginnings of their great community home in the berry bush were made in early May when a single lean and hungry queen mother crept from a crevice in the heart of a great hollow chestnut where she had survived the winter. She sunned herself for a time at the opening, then began eagerly chewing fibre from a gray and bare dead limb near by. She chewed this and when it was softened to a pulp she flew straight to the berry bush and began her long summer’s work. Laboring patiently she made and brought enough of the paper pulp moistened with her own saliva to form a nest half the size of an egg containing just a few cells in a single comb that was horizontal and opened downward. In these she laid an egg each, worker’s eggs.