The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-07-17
SOME WAYS OF WASPS.
NEXT TO THE SERPENT THE WASP
 IS MAYS OLDEST ENEMY.

1
 Generally Gets It-The Fate of tn | Queen of the Swarm Inventors O Wood Pulp Paper.
 | If the serpent is mans oldest enemy | the Wasp-Whch must have been z
 general nuisance in the ark-comeS
 second, for, search antiquity as yol
 may, you will find no good word for the
 wasp. Angry" ''spiteful, 'veno- nous, ''revengeful" are the poets ep' ithets, so familiar by tradition as to
 have become synonyms for wasp | ish'' nature; and, though the excellent
 Kirby and Spence venture so far 1T apology for the slim Waisted, fire
 tailed brigand as to call him brisk anc lively such half praise is as bal as
 blame. For man instinctively feels
 that no room ever built was big enough for him to share peacefully with | brisk and lively" wasp. Even our | folklore, often kindly to small life bids us stay the first wasp we see in spring for luck"
 | And this is one of those utilitarian ] proverbs which suggests the authorship of some far-seeing philanthropist of old, who knew more and thought fur ther than the unborn generations which | have superstitiously followed his teach | ing for centuries; as in India the in- credibiy ancient decree of sanctity to | the COW seems to have been but a statesmanlike trick for preserving alive the animal upon which the peoples ex- | istence depends.
 | For why should 1t be lucky" to kill the wasp in spring? Simply because one dexterous flip with handkerchief, one adroit back handler with the flat of @ spade, then achieves result which is potentially equivalent to the labori- ous destruction of some thirty thou sand Wasps in the fruit season, For the early wasps, whose buzzing flight along the ground in the thin sunlight attunes our hearts to sympathy as a sign of spring" is a queen wasp, one of the few survivors of some huge col ony of the previous year, and her very figure, with it's solid sections linked by threadlike waist, typifies the slender ness of the connection in her solitary person of the populous wasp cities of successive years.
 Where our prophets, poets and phi losophers condescend to insect life for improving precepts, they bid us either go to the ant or observe the bee. Yet for sublimty of self-sacriflcing labor and heroic devotion to posterity the whole range of nature holds no figure so queenly as that of the queen wasp. Compared with her, the vaunted queen bee is pampered sluggard who ought to ''go to the ant herself; and if she did, she would only find her majesty of the ants to be an overfed and bloated egg bag.
 But the queen wasp asks nothing of her people that she has not. single handed achieved herself. Last au tumn she was merely female" one of a ruge, happy, hard-working com munity; but now, when the silky breath of spring draws her from her long witer's sleep, she finds herself alone shivering perhaps in one Of the many chambered galleries where she and thousands of her family were born and labored but where now moldy si- lence reigns. Perhaps her stiffened limbs are cramped into a crevice be- tween brick wall and hairy ivy stump where dead leaves tangled in dusty cobweb made a most unroyal chamber, yet one into which her halffrozen ma iesty was glad to crawl on that No vember ofternoon when shift Of the wind to the north caught her belated on the ivy bloom, the last resource of beggared insect-folk.
 Little of the queen is in her aspect as she crawls to the light of unaccustomed day and dusts her legs in the weak spring sunlight on the wall. She IS etaggery about the knees, too, and that first attempt at flight lacks precision for it lands her legs upward on the gravel where the gardner may cheap ly secure luck" for the year with one hobnailed stamp. If he does, her story and the hopes of a large colony end to- gether.
 But if the fates are kind and the gardener unobservant, the queen picks herself up, punctiliously corrects her toilet, and, with a buzzing swerve along the provel path, just misses the box edging, and is off into space. Presently the blood new circulating healthily in every vein, she calls to mind the mighty labors before her, and com mences prospecting for a site for the great wasp metropolis whose existence depends upon her unaided resolution and industry.
 Busily she quarters the ground, es- peciaIly Investigating banks or wooded slopes, as likely places to furnish Ill some caved-in mouse hole or snail pit the small beginnings of her under ground city. Often she alights and tests the capacity of some small crev- ice sometimes, half minded, she tests 1t over and over again, flying away and returning to see how it strikes her afresh At last she finds d hole to her mind, and proceeds oat once to make the necessary alterations. With feVer-
 sh energy and tail restlessly qulVerlng up and down as though perpetually re- hearsing the part which it would play in defence of the home of her choice, she plunges into the hole repeatedly, emerging tail first and pushing loose soil or rubbish out behind her, or drag ging out small clods and stones in her Jaws. Earth soiled and bustling, she might be any low type Of agr1cultural insect, yet she is a queen.
 And when the digging labor is nn- ished she flies off, and, again quarter ing the ground like q trained spaniel finds at last some old stump or sill Of
 t1,n,,