The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-07-17

so of cells, in each of which she lays an egg. From each egg presently emerges a small grub, soft and feeble bodied, but strong in jaw, and very, very hearty in appetite.
 So all day long the ''queen" slaves to fill her chlldren's stomachs until at last they pass, full grown, to the aransposi- tion stage of ''nymph' or ''pupa"-a kind of previous mummy of a wasp and thence in due term emerge-as princesses? No; the queen needs no pampered idleness to her self made pal ace of mud and paper, and her first batch of children are sexless work CTS"
 They have had their heyday of greedy idleness as grubs; now they live for labor, and quickly the cluster Of cells built by the queen spreads to a full tier through their ceaseless toll; from this, by pillars of wood pulp-of a tougher substance than the paper of walls or cells-another tier of cells is suspended; then more pillars and an- other tier; and so on, story below story the wash city takes shape, and while the queen, working as hard as any of her subjects, is still laying eggs in new cells, the second batch of her chil- dren, male, female and neuter, throng around her and carry on her work. So the hum of metropolis arises from the orifice in which she labored, mud soiled and solitary, in spring; and her duty and life are over. She has created a nation.
 But, fortunately for man, the thou sand-fold propagation of the wasp is abruptly checked by the first frosts of October. The males-not idle drones as are male bees, but useful scavengers of the paper city-are dead or dying; and the sexless workers, who up to that time have fed and cherished the grubs of the community as though they were their own children, seem suddenly seized with hideous foreknowledge of the bangs of frosty, foodless winter, and steel their hearts to save their helpless charges from much suffering by-murdering them.
 Members of Parliament who mark the approaching close of their years la- bors by a collective massacre of the in- nocents," a wholesale slaughter of the
  bors. seldom think, perhaps, how exact ly they initiate the wasps. After the kindly crime has been committed the workers desert the city which they have converted to a shambles, and the cold catch them. At such times man hates them more heartily than ever, for they crawl on floors, too chill to fly, but not too numbed to sting.
 Alone of the populous commonwealth a few females succeed in surviving the perils of frost and snow, to emerge In spring as "queens" -limbed and tremulous. cobwebbed and dusty, with neither subjects nor palace, but only their own indomitable energy and pow erful jaws to rely upon in working out the destiny of their race.
 But not all wasps have stings, nor do all that have use them upon man, but upon spiders, grasshoppers, flies, other wasps caterpillars or vegetables, as the case may be. For there are the grand tailed wasps, that bore holes in tree bark, whence their grubs eat tunnels or destruction into the timber; tiny goll wasps, whose irritating punctures Of twigs produce such things as oak ap- ples and ruby-tufted rose gals; ichneu- mon wasps, that lay their eggs in luck less caterpillars, which are thus con- demned to a horrible, lingering death; iavelin wasps and such descriptive-ti- tied gems as the furnished blue wasp, the royal gold wasp and the brazen- tailed wasp, all of which are parasites upon other wasps and bees.
 Then there are the wasps of prey, such as that busy sort called Pompilna, which you may see upon English com- mons seizing luckiess spiders and bury ing them alive as food for wasp grubs; or the pirate Sphen, which leaps upon the chirruping cricket from behind and stings it, desperately kicking, into tor DOT; or the whole tribe of Crabro, which inject hypnotic venom into small flies for their nursery larders. Next wasps, with habits intermediate be- tween the preceding wasp parasites and the sociable wasps.
 These last are our friends-or rather our enemes-the stinging wasps of pa perv cities aforesaid, and they may be distinguished from all other wasps and bees by the neat way in which they fold their wings by their sides, suggesting the desire to leave room for the free play of their stinging tails for every schoolboy knows that a fasp can curl it's tail round to sting at angles impos- sible with the more bluff and portly bee. But when we have narrowed down the wasp" to the family or the Vespidoe or social wasps, we still ina a large variety of kinds which help to make a man miserable in many climes, and even the'common wasp or Vespa, includes at least five familiar sorts, though nine -tenths of the buzzing pests which infest our shops and houses be- long to the commonest kind-Vespa vuparis.
 Yet no created thing is altogether bad and even Vespa vulgaris sas saving grace-it exterminates house"