The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.) 1900-current, 1901-07-19

children, male, female and neuter
throng around her and carry on her
work. So the hum of a metropolis
arises from the oritice in which she la
bored, mud soiled and solitary, In
spring; and her duty and life are over.
She has created nation
But, fortunately for man, the thous-
and-fold propagation of the wasp is
abruptly checked by the first frosts of
October. The nales-not idle drones,
are male bees, but useful scaVen-
gers of the paper city-are dead or dy-
ing 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 fore
knowledge of the pangs of frosty, food
less winter. and steel their hearts to
save their helpless charges from much
suffering by numbering them.
Members of Parliament who mark
the approaching close of their years
labors by collective massacre of the
innocents," a wholesale slaughter of
the immature offspring of their united
labors, seldom think, perhaps, how ex-
actly they initiate the wasps. After
the kindly crime has been committed
the workers desert the city which they
have converted to a shambles, and die
wherever chance may lead them ana
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
perfls of frost and snow, to emerge in
spring as 'queens"-stiff limbed and
tremulous, cobwebbed and dusty, with
neither subjects nor palace, but only
their own indomitabfe 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 of destruction into the timber;
tiny COLL wasps, whose irritating punct-
ures of twigs produce such things as
oak apples and ruby-tufted rose gals
ichneumon wasps, that lay their eggs
in luckless caterpillars, which are thus
condemned to a horrible, lingering
death; jayelin wasps and such de-
scriptive titled 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 Pompil-
us, which you may see upon Eng
lish commons Selling luckless spiders
and burying them alive as food for
wasp grubs; or the pirate Sphex, which
leaps upon the chirruping cricket
from behind and stings ii. desperately
kicking, into torpor; or the whole tribe
of Crabro. which inject hypnotic venom
into small flies for their nursery lard
ers. Next come the solitary wasps and
mud wasps. with habits intermediate
between the preceding wasp parasites
and the social waSps.
These last are our friends-or rather
our enemies-the singing wasps or
papers 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, sug-
costing the desire to leave room for
the free play of their singing tails, for
every schoolboy knows that a wasp can
curl it's tail round to sting at angles
impossible with the more bluff and
portly bee. But when we have narrow
ed down the wasp to the family of
the Vespide or social wasps, we still
find large varietyof kinds which help
to make a man miserable in many
chimes, 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
belong to the comnfonest kind-Vespa
vulgaris.
Yet no created thing is altogether
bad, and even Vespa vulgaris has
saving grace-it exterminates house
flies.