|It is time, I think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He
is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been
unusually prolific this summer, and agitated correspondents have been
busy writing to the newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how
by holding your breath you may miraculously prevent him stinging you.
Now the point about the wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He
is, in spite of his military uniform and his formidable weapon, not a
bad fellow, and if you leave him alone he will leave you alone. He is
a nuisance of course. He likes jam and honey; but then I am bound
to confess that I like jam and honey too, and I daresay those
correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam and honey. We
shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like jam and honey.
But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the plate, and he
is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no doubt. He is
an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously helpless condition
from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness for beer. In the
language of America, he is a “wet.” He cannot resist beer, and having
rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully tight and
staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that he
won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
Belloc--not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so waspishly
about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about beer.
This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty
beer bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets
out. He is indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings.
He is excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody
and nothing, and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of
things; but a wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin
that he is, and will never have the sense to walk out the way he went
in. And on your plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You
can descend on him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight
for anything above him, and no sense of looking upward.
His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he
cuts a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its
time in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night
during its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and
for future generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow
stripes just lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank
you. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow----. He
runs through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time
in August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving
only the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of
20,000 or so next summer.
But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet
he could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than
the bee, for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel
competent to speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for
I've been living in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the
orchard, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million bees
and tens of thousands of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never
deliberately attacked by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around
me I flee for shelter. There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp,
the bee's hatred is personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some
obscure reason, and is always ready to die for the satisfaction of
its anger. And it dies very profusely. The expert, who has been taking
sections from the hives, showed me her hat just now. It had nineteen
stings in it, planted in as neatly as thorns in a bicycle tyre.
It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked,
and I like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little
joint, usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real
virtue, and this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean
fellow, and is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of
that supreme abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is
very cunning. I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He
got the blow fly down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed
off one of the creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape,
and then with a huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away.
And I confess he carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a
whole generation of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
help a fellow in distress.
Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to
one that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was
continued for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to
stroke gently the injured wings.
There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp
as an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to
kill her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we
wish ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for
their enemy.
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