The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1901-07-19
SOME WAYS OF WASPS.
NEXT TO THE SERPENT THE WASP
Is MANS OLDEST ENEMY.

4"ChCENht Wells rue VI VIC
Queen of the Swarm--Inventors of
Wood Pulp Paper.
From the London Daily Express.
| If the serpent is mans oldest enemy
the wasp-which must have been a
general nuisance in the ark-came sec
ond, for, search antiquity as you may.
you will find no good word for the
wasp. Angry spiteful," venom
GUS, ''vengefur' are the poets cpl
thets, so familiar by tradition as to
have become synonyms for a wasp
ish' nature, and. though the excellent
Kirby, and Spence venture so far in
! apology for the slim-waisted fire-tail-
ed brigand as to call him brisk and
lively, such half praise is as bad as
blame. For man instinctiyely 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 slay the first wasp we see in
spring for luck"
And this is one of those unitarian
proverbs which suggests the author
ship of some farseeing philanthropist
| of old. who knew more and thought
further than the unborn generations
| which have superstitiously followed his
teaching for centuries: as in India the
| incredibly ancient decree of sanctity
to the COW seems to have been but a
statesmanlike trick for preserving
alive the animal upon which the peo-
pies existence depends.
For why should it be lucky to kill
t. 49,
one dexterous flip with a. handkerchief,
one adroit back-hander with the fiat
OF spade, then achieves result which
is potentially equivalent to the labori-
GUS destruction Of some 10000 wasps in
the fruit season. For the early wasp,
whose buzzing fight along the ground
in the thin sunlight attunes our
hearts to a sympathy as a sign of
spring" is a queen wasp. one of the
few survivors of some huge colony of
the previous year, and her very figure,
with its solid sections. linked by a
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 phil
osophers condescend to insect life for
improving precepts. they bid us either
go to the ant or observe the bee. Yet
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 Wanted queen.
bee is a pampered slugggard who ought
to ego 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 nannla that she has No
| handed achieved herself. Last autumn
she was merely a female" one of a
huge, happy, hard working community.
but now, when the silky breath of
spring draws her from her long win
te's sleep. she finds herself alone shiv.
ering perhaps in one of the many
chanlbered galleries where she
and thousands of her fam
lily were born and labored
but where now moldy silence
reigns. Perhaps her stiffened limbs are
cramped into a crevice between brick
wall and hairy ivy stump, where dead
leaves tangled in a dusty cobweb made
a most unroyal chamber, yet one into
which her half frozen majesty was glad
to crawl on that November afternoon
when a 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 unaccus-
| toned day, and dusts her legs in the
weak spring sunlight on the wall She
| is staggery about the knees too and
i that first attempt at fight lacks pre-
cision, for it lands her legs upward on
| the gravel, where the gardner may
cheaply secure Tuck" for the year with
one hobnailed stamp. If he does, her
story and the hopes of a large colony
end together.
But if the fates are kind and the
gardner unobservant, the queen picks
herself up, punctilious1y corrects her
toilet, and. with buzzing swerve along
the gravel path, just misses the box
edging and is off into space. Present
ly the blood now circulating health
lily 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-
pecialIy investigating banks or wood
ed slopes as likely places to furnish in
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 Gre
vice: sonnet times, half minded, she tests
it over and over again, flying away and
returning to see how II strikes her
afresh. At last she finds a hole to her
mind, and proceeds at once to make
the necessary alterations. With few
erish energy and tail restlessly CULVER
ing up and down as though perpetual
ly rehearsing the part which it would
play in defense of the home of her
choice, she plunges into the hole re-
peatedly, emerging tail first and push
ing loose soil or rubbish out behind her,
or dragging out small clods and stones
in her jaws. Earth soiled and bus
thing she might be any low type of
agricultural insect, yet she is a queen.
And when the digging labor is fin
ished she flies off. and, again quar-
tering the ground like a trained span.
iel finds at last some old stump or
sill OF wood, some fallen trunk or
weatherworn wound in growing tim
Der, wherein she settles and proceeds
to bite off bits of wood and chew them
into paste. With this she flies TO the
hole again, and with jaws, and head.
and feet molds the thin-drawn paste
into fine gray paper, silky. strong and
waterproof.
Here is an invention-"paper from
wood pulp"-which has been Uttered
before the blind eyes Of man ever since
in prehistoric ages he first destroyed
wasps' nests, but was reserved to be
his triumph" at the end of the nine
teenth century of our modern eral OF