Wasps, Social and Solitary

AS the tendency of mankind to crowd into towns grows stronger the joys of country life and the workings of Nature are more and more excluded from the daily experience of humanit...

BEFORE we had worked long on our Vespa family we were beguiled by tempting opportunities into running after the solitary wasps. The solitaries, so far as species are concerned,...

THIS wasp (Sphex ichneumonea Linn.) is one of our most beautiful species, its great size and its brilliant color, as it flies among the flowers, serving to make it well known to...

In a search for the nest of one of our garden wasps we found, in the woods beyond the fence, an old, weather–beaten stump which was riddled with holes both large and small. The...

THE highest point of the island is crowned by a great group of linden trees; and one day their perfume, carried by the wind far over field and wood, was calling everything that...

OUR children often made themselves useful by reporting finds in the shape of nests, and one day they returned from the island with a wonderful tale of great numbers of big wasps...

DUFOUR, in describing the fearful ravages of Cerceris ornata among the bees, says that the wasps of this genus are among other insects what eagles and hawks are among birds. Whi...

OUR two species of Trypoxylon are both slender–waisted black wasps, albopilosum having bunches of snowy white hairs on the first legs, and measuring three quarters of an inch in...

WHILE Ammophila provides caterpillars for her larva, and Bembex, after the manner of the social wasps, feeds her young from day to day on dead flies, the Pompilidæ, so far as th...

EARLY in September a little black Tachytes suddenly became very common in the garden. The first one that we saw was going forwards in a series of long jumps, carrying a small gr...

THE nests of Pelopæus cœruleus and Pelopæus cementarius, our two mud–daubers, are common under eaves and in other sheltered places, and many a country boy on opening them has be...

WE once made a number of experiments to discover in what way the social wasps came back to the nest on returning from their hunting expeditions. Were they endowed with some inna...

OUR study of the activities of wasps has satisfied us that it is impracticable to classify them in any simple way. The old notion that the acts of bees, wasps, and ants were all...