by Grant Allen
I should add that the antennæ or feelers (not included in this last sketch, but conspicuous in all the previous illustrations) are in all likelihood sense-organs, whose precise nature has never been altogether established. Some naturalists believe that they are used as organs of smell; others that they are combined organs of touch and guidance; yet others, that they are the seat of a “sixth sense” unknown to humanity. However this may be, it is at least certain that they are useful as a means of communication between the insect himself and his mate, his young, his friends, and his acquaintances. Earwigs clearly feel their way, to a great extent, by the aid of the antennæ, and also recognise through them their visitors and family. They use them, too, in caressing or fondling their mates and their children. It is known that the antennæ are provided with numerous nerve-terminals, as is always the case with organs of the senses; and I believe myself that, by their means, all insects of the same species are able to communicate more or less with one another by established signals. Perhaps the antennæ emit peculiar perfumes, which are recognised in turn by those of the friend or mate; perhaps it is by touches and strokes that the insects transmit their ideas to one another. But that they do transmit ideas, nobody who has watched them closely ever doubts for a moment, and many naturalists even use the word “talking” of the parleys which ants and other insects carry on with their feelers.
It may be thought that an earwig’s life, like a policeman’s, “is not a happy one.” This I hold to be an error. The earwig loves damp and darkness, it is true, but he flies at night in the beautiful twilight or by the soft rays of the moon, while his days are solaced by the companionship of his mate and his chosen comrades, for they are gregarious creatures. The mother tends her young with the assiduity of a hen sitting on her chickens, and food being abundant and cheap, life runs, as a rule, fairly smoothly with the earwig.
VII. THE FIRST PAPER-MAKER
THE civilised world could hardly get on nowadays without paper; yet paper-making is, humanly speaking, a very recent invention. It dates, at furthest, back to the ancient Egyptians. “Humanly speaking,” I say, not without a set purpose; because man was anticipated as a paper-maker by many millions of years; long before a human foot trod the earth, there is reason to suppose that ancestral wasps were manufacturing paper, almost as they manufacture it for their nests to-day, among the subtropical vegetation of an older and warmer Europe. And the wasp is so clever and so many-sided a creature, that to consider him (or more accurately her) in every aspect of life within the space of a few pages would be practically impossible. So it is mainly as a paper-manufacturer and a consumer of paper that I propose to regard our slim-waisted friend in this chapter.
It is usual in human language to admit, as the Latin Grammar ungallantly puts it, that “the masculine is worthier than the feminine, the feminine than the neuter.” Among wasps, however, the opposite principle is so clearly true — the queen or female is so much more important a person in the complex community, and so much more in evidence than the drone or male — that I shall offer no apology here for setting her history before you first, and giving it precedence over that of her vastly inferior husband. Place aux dames is in this instance no question of mere external chivalrous courtesy; it expresses the simple truth of nature, that, in wasp life, the grey mare is the better horse, and bears acknowledged rule in her own city household. Not only so, but painful as it may sound to my men readers, and insulting to our boasted masculine superiority, the neuter in this case ranks second to the feminine; for the worker wasps, which are practically sexless, being abortive females, are far more valuable members of the community than their almost useless fathers and brothers. I call them neuter, because they are so to all intents and purposes: though for some unknown reason that seemingly harmless word acts upon most entomologists like a red rag on the proverbial bull. They will allow you to describe the abortive female as a worker only.
In No. 1, therefore, I give an illustration of a queen wasp; together with figures of her husband and of her unmarriageable daughter. The queen or mother wasp is much the largest of the three; and you will understand that she needs to be so, when you come to learn how much she has to do, how many eggs she has to lay; and how, unaided, this brave foundress of a family not only builds a city and peoples it with thousands of citizens, but also feeds and tends it with her own overworked mouth — I cannot honestly say her hands — till her maiden daughters are of age to help her. Women’s-rights women may be proud of the example thus set them. Nature nowhere presents us, indeed, with a finer specimen of feminine industry and maternal devotion to duty than in the case of these courageous and pugnacious insects.
But I will not now enlarge upon the features of these three faithful portraits, “expressed after the life,” as Elizabethan writers put it, because as we proceed I shall have to call attention in greater detail to the meaning of the various parts of the body. It must suffice for the moment to direct your notice here to that very familiar portion of the wasp’s anatomy, the sting, or ovipositor, possessed by the females, both perfect and imperfect — queens or workers — but not by those defenceless creatures, the males. The nature of the sting (so far as it is not already well known to most of us by pungent experience) I will enter into later; it must suffice for the present to say that it is in essence an instrument for depositing the eggs, and that it is only incidentally turned into a weapon of offence or defence, and a means of stunning or paralysing the prey or food-insects.
The first thing to understand about a community of wasps is the way it originates. The story is a strange one. When the first frosts set in, almost all the wasps in temperate countries die off to a worker from the effects of cold. The chill winds nip them. For a few days in autumn you may often notice the last straggling survivors crawling feebly about, very uncomfortable and numb from the cold, and with their temper somewhat soured by the consciousness of their own exceeding weakness. In this irritable condition, feeling their latter end draw nigh, they are given to using their stings with waspish virulence on the smallest provocation; they move about half-dazed on the damp ground, or lie torpid in their nests till death overtakes them. Of the whole populous city which hummed with life and business but a few weeks earlier, no more than two or three survivors at the outside struggle somehow through the winter, to carry on the race of wasps to succeeding generations. The colder the season, the fewer the stragglers who live it out; in open winters, on the contrary, a fair number doze it through, to become the foundresses of correspondingly numerous colonies.
And who are these survivors? Not the lordly and idle drones; not even the industrious neuters or workers; but the perfect females or queens, the teeming mothers to be of the coming communities. Look at the royal lady figured in No. 1. As autumn approaches, this vigorous young queen weds one of the males from her native nest. But shortly afterwards, he and all the workers of his city fall victims at once to the frosts of October. They perish like Nineveh. The queen, however, bearing all the hopes of the race, cannot afford to fling away her precious life so carelessly. That is not the way of queens. She seeks out some sheltered spot among dry moss, or in the crannies of the earth — a sandy soil preferred — where she may hibernate safely. There, if she has luck, she passes the winter, dormant, without serious mishap. Of course, snow and frost destroy not a few such solitary hermits; a heavy rain may drown her; a bird may discover her chosen retreat; a passing animal may crush her. But in favourable circumstances, a certain number of queens do manage to struggle safely through the colder months; and the wasp-supply of the next season mainly depends upon the proportion of such lucky ladies that escape in the end all winter dangers. Each queen that lives through the hard times becomes in spring the foundress of a separate colony; and it is on this account that farmers and fruit-growers often pay a small reward for every queen wasp killed early in the spring. A single mother wasp destroyed in May is equivalent to a whole nest destroyed in July or August.
As soon as warmer weather set
s in, the dormant queen awakes, shakes off dull sloth, and forgets her long torpor. With a toss and a shake, she crawls out into the sunshine, which soon revives her. Then she creeps up a blade of grass, spreads her wings, and flies off. Her first care is naturally breakfast; and as she has eaten nothing for five months, her hunger is no doubt justifiable. As soon, however, as she has satisfied the most pressing wants of her own nature, maternal instinct goads her on to provide at once for her unborn family. She seeks a site for her nest, her future city. How she builds it, and of what materials, I will tell you in greater detail hereafter; for the moment, I want you to understand the magnitude of the task this female Columbus sets herself — Columbus, Cornelia, and Cæsar in one — the task not only of building a Carthage, but also of peopling it. She has no hands to speak of but her mouth, which acts at once as mouth, and hands, and tools, and factory, and stands her in good stead in her carpentering and masonry. She does everything with her mouth; and therefore, of course, she has a mouth which has grown gradually adapted for doing everything. The monkey used his thumb till he made a hand of it; the elephant his trunk till he could pick up a needle. Use brings structure; by dint of using her mouth so much, the wasp has acquired both organs fit for her, and dexterity in employing them.
The first point she has now to consider is the placing of her nest. In this she is guided partly by that inherited experience which we describe (somewhat foolishly) as instinct, and partly by her own individual intelligence. Different races of wasps prefer different situations: some of them burrow underground; others hang their houses in the branches of trees; others again seek some dry and hollow trunk. But personal taste has also much to do with it; thus the common English wasp sometimes builds underground, but sometimes takes advantage of the dry space under the eaves of houses. All that is needed is shelter, especially from rain; wherever the wasp finds a site that pleases her, there she founds her family.
Let us imagine, then, that she has lighted on a suitable hole in the earth — a hole produced by accident, or by some dead mole or mouse or rabbit; she occupies it at once, and begins by her own labour to enlarge and adapt it to her private requirements. As soon as she has made it as big as she thinks necessary, she sets to work to collect materials for building the city. She flies abroad, and with her saw-like jaws rasps away at a paling or other exposed piece of wood till she has collected a fair amount of finely powdered fibrous matter. I will show you later on the admirable machine with which she scrapes and pulps the fragments of wood-fibre. Having gathered a sufficient quantity of this raw material to begin manufacturing, she proceeds to work it up with her various jaws and a secretion from her mouth into a sort of coarse brown paper; the stickiness of the secretion gums the tiny fragments of wood together into a thin layer. Then she lays down the floor of her nest, and proceeds to raise upon it a stout column or foot-stalk of papery matter, sufficiently strong to support the first two or three layers of cells. She never builds on the ground, but begins her nest at the top of the supporting column. The cells are exclusively intended for the reception of eggs and the breeding of grubs, not (as is the case with bees) for the storing of honey. We must remember, however, that the original use of all cells was that of rearing the young; the more advanced bees, who are the civilised type of their kind, make more cells than they need for strictly nursery purposes, and then employ some of them as convenient honey jars. The consequence is that beehives survive intact from season to season (unless killed off artificially), while the less prudent wasps die wholesale by cityfuls at the end of each summer.
Having thus supplied a foundation for her topsy-turvy city, our wasp-queen proceeds in due course to build it. At the top of the original column, or foot-stalk, she constructs her earliest cells, the nurseries for her three first-born grubs. They are not built upward, however, above the foot-stalk, but downward, with the open mouth below, hanging like a bell. Each is short and shallow, about a tenth of an inch in depth to begin with, and more like a cup, or even a saucer, than a cell at this early stage. The Natural History Museum at South Kensington possesses some admirable examples of such nests, in various degrees of growth; and my fellow-worker, Mr. Enock, has obtained the kind permission of the authorities at the Museum to photograph the cases which contain them, for the purposes of these articles. They represent the progress of the queen-wasp’s work at two, five, and fifteen days respectively (Nos. 2, 3, and 4), and thus admirably illustrate the incredible rapidity with which, alone and unaided, she builds and populates this one-mother city.
As soon as the first cells are formed in their early shallow shape, the busy mother, sallying forth once more in search of wood or fibre, proceeds to make more paper-pulp, and construct an umbrella-shaped covering above the three saucers. In each of the three she lays an egg; and then, leaving the eggs to hatch out quietly by themselves into larvæ, she goes on cutting — not bread and butter, like Charlotte in Thackeray’s song — but more wood-fibre to make more cells and more coverings. These new cells she hangs up beside the original three, and lays an egg in each as soon as it is completed. But a mother’s work is never finished; and surely there was never a mother so hardly tasked as the royal wasp foundress. By the time she has built and stocked a few more cells, the three eggs first laid have duly hatched out, and now she must begin to look after the little grubs or larvæ. I have not illustrated this earliest stage of wasp-life, the grubby or nursery period, because everybody knows it well in real life. Now, as the grubs hatch out, they require to be fed, and the poor, overworked mother has henceforth not only to find food for herself, and paper to build more cells, but also to feed her helpless, worm-like offspring. There they lie in their cradles, head downward, crying always for provender, like the daughters of the horse-leech. Forgive her, therefore, if her temper is sometimes short, and if she resents intrusion upon the strawberry she is carting away to feed her young family by a hasty sting, administered, perhaps, with rather more asperity than a lady should display under trying circumstances. Some of my readers are mothers themselves, and can feel for her. Nor is even this all. The grubs of wasps grow fast — in itself a testimonial to the constant care with which a devoted mother feeds and tends them: and even as they grow the poor queen (a queen but in name, and more like a maid-of-all-work in reality) has continually to raise the cell-wall around them. What looked at first like shallow cups, thus grow at last into deep, hollow cells, the walls being raised from time to time by the addition of papery matter, with the growth of the inmates. In this first or foundation-comb — the nucleus and original avenue of the nascent city — the walls are never carried higher than the height of the larva that inhabits them. As the grub grows, the mother adds daily a course or layer of paper, till the larva reaches its final size, a fat, full grub, ready to undergo its marvellous metamorphosis. Then at last it begins to do some work on its own account: it spins a silky, or cottony, web, with which it covers over the mouth or opening of the cell; though even here you must remember it derives the material from its own body, and therefore ultimately from food supplied it by the mother. How one wasp can ever do so much in so short a time is a marvel to all who have once watched the process.
While the baby wasps remain swaddled in their cradle cells, their food consists in part of honey, which the careful mother distributes to them impartially, turn about, and in part of succulent fruits, such as the pulp of pears or peaches. The honey our housekeeper either gathers for herself or else steals from bees, for truth compels me to admit that she is as dishonest as she is industrious; but on the whole, she collects more than she robs, for many flowers lay themselves out especially for wasps, and are adapted only for fertilisation by these special visitants. Such specialised wasp-flowers have usually small helmet-shaped blossoms, exactly fitted to the head of the wasp, as you see it in Mr. Enock’s illustrations; and they are for the most part somewhat livid and dead-meaty in hue. Common scrophularia, or fig-wort, is a good example of a plant that thus lays itself out to encourage the visits of wasps;
it has small lurid-red flowers, just the shape and size of the wasp’s head, and its stamens and style are so arranged that when the wasp rifles the honey at the base of the helmet, she cannot fail to brush off the pollen from one blossom on to the sensitive surface of the next. Moreover, the scrophularia comes into bloom at the exact time of year when the baby wasps require its honey; and you can never watch a scrophularia plant for three minutes together without seeing at least two or three wasps busily engaged in gathering its nectar. Herb and insect have learned to accommodate one another; by mutual adaptation they have fitted each part of each to each in the most marvellous detail.
