Wasps

     (re-post)                                                    

Each year I am given a gift and each year I have forgotten and am surprised.  I will be sitting on the deck or in the garden by a fence.  Once I was with a friend and startled us both with suddenly widened eyes and finger to lips.  (Is this a universal signal for silence; I wonder.)

It’s the scritching sound that gently fingernails the consciousness.  A soothing, yet industrious, scritch, scritch, scritch.

I shiver with delight, the unexpectedness of it, the anticipation of the treat.  Then I begin to search. 

This year it was late evening and I was questing at sunset.  When I found the source of the sound I first gave admiration for such diligence so late in the day.  “Working overtime, are you?” I inquired.  She paused, perhaps disturbed by my voice or the feel of my breath, perhaps intuiting perfectly what I was saying and acknowledging the praise.  You have guessed.  It was a paper wasp. Patiently gnawing away on an old board, shaving off slivers.

I knew it was gathering wood with which to make its nest but now I wanted more details.  Next day I went to the children’s section of the library where one can find the essence of information, simple, clear, well-illustrated.

And once again, whenever I take a step or two into the world of insects, I feel I have entered a world of magic, of miracles.  Had I pursued a serious study of entomology I may have dissolved in wonder the first month, the scientist not so much mad as awe-struck!

That lady wasp,  (the male’s only chore is procreation), who may well have been a queen establishing her nest, mixes the wood scritchings with water she has in her body, chews and chews and makes paper.  She then forms this into those intricate womb-rooms that make up the nest.  But first she builds a slender stalk that will anchor the entire edifice. How fascinating it must be to watch her doing this: it would affect me the next time I work in clay or make paper.

Each egg she fertilizes as it passes through her body by sperm gathered from mating with several males eight months before and sticks one egg to the wall of each chamber of her single-layered, open-ended nest so it won’t fall out.  Wow to all of these details and I would comment but space does not permit and I must tell you…

The egg quickly grows into a white grub, with dark mouthparts, which the queen feeds with tomato hornworm caterpillars that she kills, cuts into pieces, and chews into ‘baby food’. She gets a bit of nourishment from this but her neck, the diameter of a paper clip, is too narrow for her to swallow the mush.

  Now listen – this is astonishing.  The grub makes a sugary substance from the caterpillar that an adult wasp can eat!  The queen – and subsequent wasps: once she has produced workers she concentrates on laying eggs and guiding the colony with pheromones to do the many chores, (another loud wow from me) – taps on the side of the cell to alert the grub and then chews on its mouthparts to get it to give her a meal.

Once the grub has grown large enough to fill its cavity in the nest it still manages to weave a web around itself and over the opening of its cell.  If it gets too warm in the nest, worker wasps will bring water and sprinkle it on the web so that the evaporation causes cooling.  (I expect you are wow’ing now too.)

What emerges from this pupa state is a full-sized worker wasp, a female.  Some eggs the queen does not fertilize and these turn into males.  Some grubs are fed more than others and these turn into queens which the males fertilize and which go off and find a place to rest over the winter and then in the spring head off to your or my old garden fence and start a brand new colony.

Near the end of the summer, as the food sources diminish and the weather begins to change, the wasps begin to decrease the nest of inhabitants, tossing out grubs and workers.  The workers and males will fly off and die before winter but the queens will hibernate.

If you wish to see photographs of this incredible drama, make like a kid and awe your way through Wasps At Home by Bianca Lavies.

Of course you know what all this has to do with gardening.  Everything!  Wasps are yet another link in the chain and it seems to me the more we understand nature, human and otherwise, the more likely we are to appreciate the role played.  To pause in that swatting motion, that “where’s-the-insect-killer-spray” thought, and open mind and heart to a fellow creature.  The results are often surprising, always worthwhile.

October 2008