object--how was she to know that it was the yellow signal of danger in
the insect world that she saw? And, of course, being a baby, she was
going to stuff it into her mouth. But Fate had use for that
wasp--perhaps for that baby. Wherefore there was a little scream, a
pair of woman's arms swept down and whisked that baby into the air, and
a high-heeled shoe whisked the astonished wasp into a corner. Here she
swore savagely, vibrating her head with tremendous speed in the
process, rose heavily and menacingly, made to fly out, hit the upper
window, which was shut, and which she could not see, but felt, and fell
to the floor again, where she apparently had brain-fever, buzzing round
and round on her back like a top the while.
And then, rising suddenly, the queen flew away, hitting nothing in the
process, but getting through the lower and open part of the window.
She seemed anxious to make sure of not getting into the house again.
She flew right away, rising high to top the garden hedge, and dropping
low on the far side, to buzz and poke about in and out, up along the
hedge-bank that bordered the hayfield.
She flew as one looking for something, and every insect in her way took
jolly good care--in the shape of scintillating streaks and dashes--to
get out of it. The mere sight of that yellow-banded cuirass shining in
the sun was apparently quite enough for them--most of them, anyway. As
a matter of fact, she was looking for a site for a city. She had
ambition, and would found her a city, a city of her very own, with
generous streets at right angles, on the American plan; and she would
be queen of it. It was a big idea, and we should have said an
impossible one, seeing that at that moment she was the city and its
population and its queen all rolled into one, so to speak.
Queen-wasps, however, also on the American plan, ruled the word
"impossible" out of their dictionary long ago. They "attempt the end,
and never stand to doubt."
The queen came to rest on a bare patch of ground an front of a hole,
and a black and hairy spider, with two hindlegs missing on the offside,
spun round in the entrance of that hole to face her. He had not been
noticeable until he moved.
She left him in a hurry, and thereafter resumed her endless searching
along the hedge-bank. A dozen times she vanished into a hole, and,
after a minute or so, came out again with the air of one dissatisfied.
Half-a-dozen times she came out tail first, buzzing warnings and very
angry, at the invitation of a bumble-bee queen, a big, hook-jawed,
carnivorous beetle in shining mail, and so forth, but she never lost
her head.
Finally, she came to a mole-hole that suited her. The other burrows
had all turned out to be field-mouse holes, leading ultimately into a
main tunnel that ran the whole length of the hedge apparently, and was
a public way for all the little whiskered ones. But this tunnel, bored
by the miner mole, ran nowhither, having caved in not far from the
entrance, and was very sound of construction, with a nice dry slope.
She selected a wide spot where the tunnel branched, each branch forming
a _cul-de-sac_. Here she slew swiftly several suspicious-looking
little tawny beetles and one field-cricket, who put up a rare good
fight for it, found loafing about the place.
It pleased the queen that here, in this spot, she would found her a
city. But first she must, as it were, take the latitude and the
longitude of this her stronghold to be. She must know where her city
was, must make absolutely dead sure, certain, of finding it again when
she went out. Otherwise, if she lost it--well, there would be an end
to it before it had begun, so to speak. For this purpose, therefore,
she rose slowly, humming to herself some royal incantation--rose, upon
a gradually widening corkscrew spiral, into the air.
She was, in point of fact, surveying the district round her capital to
be, marking each point--bush, stone, grass-tuft, tree-trunk,
flower-cluster, clod, branch, anything and everything, great and
small--and jotting down in indelible memory fluid, upon whatever she
kept for a brain, just precisely the position of every landmark. And
as she rose her circles ever widened, so that at last her big compound
eyes took in quite a big stretch of sunlit picture, to be photographed
upon her memory, and there remain forevermore.
It took her some time, for it was some job; but once done, it was done
for good.
Next, alighting with great hustle--now that the work was once
begun--the queen ran into her tunnel, and made sure that nobody had
"jumped her claim" in the interval. She found an ant, red and
ravenous, taking too professional an interest in the place, and she
abolished that ant with one nip; though, as you may be sure, the tiny
insect fought like a bulldog.
Then she executed a shallow excavation upon the site of the future city
itself, carrying each pellet of earth outside beyond the entrance.
This also took time, though she worked at fever-pitch, almost with
fury; but she managed to finish it, and fly away into the landscape in
a remarkably short while, considering.
Here once again she appeared to be searching for something through the
yellow sunshine and the falling blossom-petals--confetti from Spring's
wedding. And presently she found it, or seemed to--an old gate, off
its hinges. But the wood was rotting, and she was no fool. She knew
her job--the job she had never done before, by the way--and after
humming around it in a fretful, undecided sort of fashion for some
while, she flew on. Apparently she was looking for wood, but not _any_
wood. Cut wood appeared to be her desire, and that oak; at least, she
put behind her a deal board lying half-overgrown, after one careful
professional inspection.
Her way was through a perilous world, beset by a thousand foes, mostly
in the nature of traps and lines and barbed-wire entanglements set by
spiders. As a rule you didn't see these last at all--nor did she; but
her yellow-and-black badge usually won her a way of respect--and
hate--and she cut or struggled herself clear of such web-lines as her
feelers failed to spot in time.
At last she found some real oak rails, and set to work upon them at
once, planing with her sharp shear-jaws. A tiger-beetle, gaudy and
hungry-eyed, sought to pounce upon her in this task. He was
long-legged, and keen, and lean, and very swift; but she shot aloft
just in time; and when she came down again, with a z-zzzzp, as quickly
as she went up, sting first, he had wisely dodged into a cranny, where
he defied her with open and jagged jaws.
Again getting to work, she planed off a pellet of good sound wood--it
looked like a nail-scrape, the mark she made--and masticating it and
moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to her
city in the making.
There was a whir and a buzz as she passed through the portals of her
main gate from the light of day, and she reappeared again, backing out,
"looking daggers," as we say, and brandishing her poisoned dart--her
sting, if you insist, on the end of her tail--in the air. But she
still hung on to her pellet.
Presumably some unlucky visitor had called in her absence. More sounds
of concentrated argument followed, and finally there fell out, rather
than rushed out, a small and amazingly slender black wasp, one of those
hermits who seem to consecrate their lives to lonely working for a
family they never see. This unhappy one slid down the bank, curled up
at the bottom, uncurled, curled up again, and--remained curled.
Apparently _her_ day's work was done, which comes of falling foul of
the yellow flag.
Arrived inside, at her hallowed chamber, our queen carefully selected a
rootlet in the roof--not just any old rootlet, mark you; never any
"old" anything, you will notice, but a good, sound, well-found rootlet
that you could hang five or six pounds' weight to; indeed, three
rootlets before she had finished. To these rootlets she
fastened--gummed would be a more correct word--her pellet of
wasp-paper, in the form of a thin layer, and hurried away, singing, for
more. This was, so to speak, the foundation-stone of the city, laid,
be it noticed, not haphazard--our queen never did any business that
way--but with mathematical regard as to what was to follow. In very
fact, too, it was the foundation-stone of her city, only upside-down,
though that is nothing. Wasps always do things that way, which is
unlike ants, those other and greater city builders.
Back came the queen very soon with another load, and pasted
that--thin--to the first layer, hurrying, bustling, humming a happy
song continuously to herself. Then away again for more, and in the
process to a lively battle with a robber-fly, who appeared set upon
robbing her of her blood. It tried, like the beetle, to stalk her and
pounce upon her back, what time she was planing out wood for
paper-pulp; but her back wasn't there when it pounced, and her jaws
were. It "waited on," hovering like a falcon, and twice as keen, and
when she got to work again, dropped like a hurled lance-head, only to
be met with jaws, wide and ready, as before.
It went away, watching from afar--far for an insect--from "the little
speedwell's darling blue" upon the hedge-bank, and just as she was
moistening the load, gathered ready to fly off, delivered its final
ultimatum--a marvelously persistent murderer. This time it, or,
rather, she, was received with the point--the poisoned point--and,
turning like a spent lightning-flash to avoid it, found the queen hard
on her heels, following all down the gay hedge-ditch, humming high, in
nearly a shriek of rage. Finally, she turned, to do battle for her
life, and the two, grappling, fell as shooting-stars fall, gleaming,
athwart the sun, with a brrr-r like a fused wire, and finished the job,
rolling over and over on the ground--rolling over and over among the
stalks of bluebells, like the heavens "upraising from the earth."
It is written, however, that few in the insect world can withstand a
queen of the yellow devils, and in a few seconds the wasp got up and
flew home again, quite unperturbed. The robber-fly did not get up, and
she was not quite unperturbed, but died as they die who are poisoned
with formic acid, and very soon was still.
By the time the shadows crept across the entrance to the derelict
mole-hole, warning the wasp back--for your true wasp is a worshiper of
the sun--the queen had formed a disc of paper, and suspended
there-from, in the middle, a stalk, also of paper, which widened out at
its base, and became, as it were, the outlines of four six-sided cells.
The cells were in the shape of a cross--that cross which you will
always find at the foundation of the cities of the waspfolk, and, in a
way, a sign or mark of their nationality--the cross in the
market-square, so to speak, outwards from which the city grew.
The queen, satisfied apparently with her new city so far, hung up and
went to sleep. When anything or anybody came to prospect for house
lots, or edible victims, during the still, silent, silver night, she
hummed very severely, like an electric fan, to let the intruders know
who she was, and they mostly backed out again in a hurry. If they took
a step nearer the hum rose an octave, and became very wicked, and that,
so far as most of them were concerned, finished it.
Two, however, there were who would not take even that hint. One was a
shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison instead, and next
morning was found running about with his mouth somewhere concealed
behind his ear, if one may be pardoned the expression, in consequence;
and the other was a carnivorous beetle, in black, purple-shot armor,
and armed with jaws toothed like lobsters' claws. The queen took some
nasty scars from those same jaws before she got home with the poisoned
point, a clean thrust 'twist breastplate and armlet, and the invader
doubled up on the spot where he was, and had to be dragged out in the
morning--not the dawning, for the sun had well stoked up before our
wasp would have anything to do with him.
[Illustration: "A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison
instead"]
She found the day already in full swing when she rose, buzzing, from
her front-gate, late--for wasps hate early morning chill, like Red
Indians--and, circling once, swung straight away. She jumped into full
hustle right off, you see. She did not merely work; she superworked.
Forced to short hours by her constitution, she had to make up for it in
the time she got, and she did. She allowed nothing to stop her. If
anything tried to, she mostly stopped it, for there was no compromise
about this nation-builder; she reached her goal every time.
It was on this journey that a spotted fly-catcher, sitting on a
gatepost, made a Euclid figure at her in midair as she passed. She had
not power to fight the bird's beak, and her poison-dagger was useless
here; nor do fly-catchers often miss. This, however, was an occasion
when one of them did--by an eighth of an inch--and only some
electric-spark-like dodging on the part of the insect in the air made
even that one miss possible. It was so quick, you could not see what
happened.
That day the cross of cells in this budding city was developed further,
and a low wall built round each cell. Moreover, more cells were built,
always taking the cross as the center of all things--six-sided cells,
with a low, incomplete wall, or, rather, parapet, partitioning each
off, to the number of about twenty-four cells in all. Each cell was
closed, of course, at the top, the top being its floor, and open at the
bottom, the bottom being, if I may so put it, the top; for, as has
already been said, wasp cities are built upside-down, and everybody
walks and hangs on his head, being so fitted for the purpose. If you
don't hang, you tumble straight down into the scooped-out cavity below;
but nobody ever does that till he dies, for that cavity is at once the
cemetery and the refuse-heap and the dust-bin of the city, a haunt of
tiny ghouls--beetle, spider, and fly ghouls--and other loathsome
horrors, the scavengers, hyenas, vultures, and jackals of the wasp
world.
Now, after making the first cell, or, rather, the part cell, with its
low parapet, the queen laid an egg--it was very minute, that
egg--inside the cell, gumming it against the top, on the angle nearest
the center of the city. It had to be cemented there; otherwise it
would have fallen out.
In the next cell she laid an egg, too, cementing it up to the top in
the same manner--always in the angle nearest the center of the
city--and in the next another egg, and so on, up to the twenty-four or
so. It is a little doubtful precisely how long she took over the
process, because, for one thing, she made so many journeys backwards
and forwards to get wood-pulp from the rails for paper manufacture--she
used paper for everything; and, for another thing, she began to roof
over the whole affair with a hanging umbrella made of layers of the
finest paper that you ever did see--much finer than that made by the
ordinary common or garden worker-wasp of the jam-pots and the
stewed-fruit dish, for was she not a queen, and therefore not common in
anything she did?--and it became, in consequence, rather hard to see
what she really was "at." Most of the time that the sky remained
cloudy she used up at this job, and also when there was a shower of
rain, for she hated rain and all shadow and darkness.
Her purpose, in regard to this paper roofing, was to keep out any
possible dripping that might come through the earth roof in wet
weather, and to store up and multiply the heat from her body. Terrific
heat, to be sure; nevertheless important in the scheme of things. When
all was completed, this city, this mighty kingdom, measured about one
and a half inches round.
When all was completed, also, the wasp flew out for a drink and a feed.
But first she cleaned. The most fastidious cat was a grimy tramp in
comparison to her in habits, and in all her spare time--goodness alone
knows how she squeezed in any spare time at all during those hustling
days!--her first, and generally her last, act was to clean. She could
not afford dirt. To be dirty, with her, was to die even more quickly
than she would, anyway; for, you see, she did not breathe through her
mouth, but all over herself, so to speak--through her armor, or
hair-like tubes in that same.
From bluebell to cowslip and lily she picked her way, sipping honey and
humming a wicked little hum through her teeth, as it were, and on to
where
Daisies pied, and violets blue,
And cuckoo buds of yellow hue,
And lady-smocks all silver white,
Do paint the meadows with delight.
Now she toyed with a yellow oxlip, now paused at a purple lungwort; but
most she went into the garden, and hovered, still as a humming-bird,
among the rose-leaves and branches, especially those growing against
the sun-bathed old wooden porch, and for so long that one wondered what
she was doing there. She was licking up the "honey-dew," which,
translated, is the juice exuded by the plant-lice or "green-fly," which
swarmed all over the rose-trees. This "honey-dew" was sweet, and in
great demand among such insects as had tastes that way; in fact, the
enterprising ants--who are always a decade ahead of everybody
else--were, in one place, building mud sheds over the said herds of
plant-lice to prevent their precious "honey-dew" being exploited by
others.
Thus a week passed, the queen fussing daily about her embryo city,
adding paper covering here, strengthening a wall there, warning off an
inquisitive insect somewhere else, and adding her heat to the natural
stuffiness of the place, though one would scarcely have thought she
could have made much difference. At times, too, in the hot sun, she
appeared here or there outside, drinking honey from some flower, or
sipping "honey-dew," much to the ants' disgust and anger.
Then, at the end of the week, the first egg hatched out within the
city, and, frankly, what came forth was not lovely. It was a legless
grub, fat, presumably blind, and helpless; and it would have fallen
head downwards out of the cell, as it hatched, if it had not had the
sense to hook its tail into its own egg-shell, which in turn, as we
know, was already fastened to the top of the cell. But it had jaws,
and in addition, apparently, an appetite to use them.
Whether the queen loved it, her first baby, was hard to tell. Did she,
indeed, ever love anything? She certainly did her duty by it; but what
was the use of setting up to be a queen, anyway, if she could not do
that? And, moreover, you've got to do your duty in the wild. There's
no profit in monkeying with Nature, as is possible with civilization,
for the penalty thereof is death.
Wherefore did our queen, after making quite sure that the sack-like
atom with a mouth, hanging upside-down in the cell, and wriggling like
anything to show its hunger, was alive, sound, and quite all there,
quit home in a hurry, and with a loud buzz, in search of rations. But
there was a change in her manner from that adopted when looking for
food for herself, and for good reason. _Then_ her object had been
honey; now it was--scalps!
From force of habit, more perhaps than from force of reasoning, she
flew to the rose-trees, and there fixed in her shear jaws not more than
two of the helpless, fool, unarmed, soft, juicy green-fly, which are
really no more, if one may so put it, than living, infinitesimal
"white" grapes. That she was challenged by a sentry ant--about as big
to her as a bulldog to us--that the sentry gave the alarm, that the
guard turned out from one of the ants' "cowsheds" over some of the
green-fly, and that she went away in a hurry, with half-a-dozen furious
ants on their hindlegs, trying to get hold of her retiring feet with
their jaws, was a matter treated by her with insolent unconcern.
She had got her scalps, and winging home in a hurry to her baby, fed it
upon green-fly. The baby did not feed nicely, and the picture of the
glistening, corsleted devil queen-mother, with her lugubrious,
mask-like face, and the wriggling, hanging sack babe, and the luckless,
fool, helpless green-fly between them, was not a pretty one. Here
maternity was not a Sunday-sermon subject, yet it was maternity all the
same.
By this time other eggs in other cells were splitting, and giving out
legless grub horrors, as seeds that give forth plants, each wriggling
mummy taking care to hook itself up to its shell by the tail at once,
lest it perish. And the queen's work from that moment really began.
Till then she had only tinkered at it, apparently. Now she got going
"real some," and--well, all the insect world outside knew it. The
terror of the yellow flag spread.
Upon an hour she would appear, dropping, hawk-like and terrible, out of
the sun-glare, and neatly pick up a soft and juicy caterpillar from a
cabbage-stalk. Upon another hour she would be discovered, feet tucked
up and wary, darting, like an iridescent gleam, around the angry ants,
among the green-fly on the rose-bushes. The drowsy hum of the kettle
on the kitchen fire, and the steady, low hum of the house-fly dance in
the middle of the room, would be answered in the long, hot afternoons
by her wicked warning drone as she came sailing in at the open window,
like the insolent pirate that she was, to go out again a minute later
with a helpless fly between her jaws. The first heat of the sun,
drinking up the dew, would discover her sailing forth to war; his full,
sizzling rays would reveal her waging violent warfare with the
bluebottle flies over some carcass; into his amber light of the noon
her yellow flag would suddenly rise from out the cool shade of the
larder, where she had been carving meat, and "when the sun mended his
twisted copper nets," he would flash in bronze from her glistening
cuirass as she droned by high over some wriggling grub, caterpillar, or
palsied fly fast locked in her jaws--and all for her young, all for her
couple of dozen legless horrors, hanging by their tails, each in its
narrow cell, in darkness and in dead silence, in the embryo city under
the secret earth.
Time was when these same grubs grew so fat and big that they no longer
hung, but became fast wedged in their dormitories; time when the queen
had to set to and extend downwards the wall of each cell lest the
growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger,
incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the
other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and
donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, refused all further
food, spun a cocoon of silk with a dome-shaped silken floor to each
cell, and for a period retired from the prying eyes of the world, even
of its own mother, into the sacred sanctuary of the chrysalis state.
Then the queen's labor lightened a little for a period, so that you
could again see her at spare moments sucking nectar from the flowers
for herself, robbing the jam-dish, or lapping up the "honey-dew" of the
green-fly.
Finally came _the_ day. It dawned all right, and there was nothing
about it to show that it was going to be different from any other fine
day; yet, as soon as the wasp woke up, she knew that, for her, it was
the day of Fate.
A very cursory inspection of the budding city showed at once that
during the night things had been happening and changes taking place.
The domed floors of several of the cells were palpitating with life
from within, and there were sounds of the gnawing and tearing of the
silken screens.
The queen became greatly excited, and began to hum and dance a little
step-dance to herself, all alone in the darkness among the cells, as
she saw her triumph evolving before her eyes. And, almost as if the
hum had called it, there rushed at her, out of the blackness across the
comb, a--a thing.
She knew by instinct that it was an enemy. Indeed, it could not well
be anything else, but it fought like a black devil.
It was, in point of fact, a mole-cricket, a creature just like its
namesake, if an insect can be said to resemble an animal, only that its
jaws were like unto the jaws of a lobster. It was a fearsome
apparition, and very much larger even than the queen. The good God
alone knoweth why it had chosen that moment and place to run apparently
amok.
But, if the mole-cricket ran amok, the queen-wasp went berserk. It was
a thing unthinkable that in that moment of triumph she, and the
awakening city with her, should be cut off--unthinkable and impossible,
unthinkable and maddening. Therefore she fought as few wasps have
probably fought before or since, and they are pretty expert exponents,
and scarcely backward ones, of warfare.
The battle that followed was awful.