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By Root 747 0

So far it’s only about the size of a baseball. The hornets—or wasps—who were spooked out of the nest after I jiggled its branch inadvertently flew to attack and afterward went back to it, perched on the outside on the gray paper, and pointed in my direction. They rapidly vibrated their abdomens—they were shivering to keep up a high muscle temperature, necessary for fast flight and for more instant attack (nest defense). I advanced no farther. Luckily I had gotten only one sting. The wasps should have good hunting—it seems to be a good caterpillar year because there is a barely audible, gentle “rain” of caterpillar fecal pellets on the leaves at night. I also found a female black ichneumon wasp in the act of injecting an egg into a young tiger swallowtail butterfly larva on a chokecherry. I got the wasp and sketched the act, then watched the sapsucker station on the birch for an hour. Relative to all the activity last year there was so far not much action; but nevertheless three hummingbirds, two satyr or wood nymph butterflies (Satyridae), about a dozen bald-faced hornets, and a swarm of small flies (and in the evening, seen by flashlight, one flying squirrel) came to feed at the sap lick.

A FRIEND OF MINE BUMPED HIS LAWN MOWER AGAINST a bush that held a nest of bald-faced hornets. He regretted it, and I suspect he now disputes Robert Frost’s eulogy of this wasp, “as good as anybody going,” precisely because its “stinging quarters menacingly work.” He was attacked by dozens of the nest’s occupants, and had to be rushed by ambulance to a hospital to save his life. He would never again (knowingly) make the same mistake, and the mere sight of a patch of the telltale gray paper of a hornets’ nest sets off alarms in him. Nor will he forget these wasps’ striking jet black bodies boldly marked in white stripes.

Fig. 12. Bald-faced hornet. Nests shown in the process of construction from golf-ball size, at left, to basketball size or larger at the end of the colony cycle, when it contains three or more vertical combs filled with eggs, larvae, and pupae.

A colony of bald-faced hornets starts out in the spring with one lone individual, the queen. She would have mated in the previous fall and then crawled underground to hibernate. As she comes out of her subterranean hiding place in the spring she shivers to bring her muscle temperature to above 95°F and then flies off in search of food. She hasn’t eaten anything for at least seven months. And, like the ruby-throated hummingbirds who have just returned from Central America at the same time of year, she will most likely end up feeding on sweet sap alongside hummingbirds, where a yellow-bellied sapsucker has cut away birch bark to get at the tree’s sap. She will feed at the sap lick, and later on in the colony cycle also from the sugary secretions with proteins that her own young regurgitate to her after she has fed them chewed-up caterpillars and other insects.

After she has refueled, the young queen becomes attracted to weathered dry wood, and with her mandibles working from side to side, she scrapes off swaths of fibers, mixes them with her saliva, and—presto—she has a gob of liquid paper pulp. She applies this pulp to the underside of a twig on a tree (or the bushes next to a lawn) to fashion a short stiff rod. Hauling in load after load of paper, she flanges the rod out to the sides and adds at the bottom of it a little battery of hexagonal cells (in shape much like the cups honeybees make out of wax, which they secrete from glands between their abdominal segments). She makes paper envelopes around her nursery of young, and while releasing a little sperm that she has stored from last fall, she also deposits an egg into each of the hexagonal paper cups. The offspring from these fertilized eggs are genetically females, though most of them will remain sterile “workers.” Much later, near the end of the summer, she will lay virgin eggs, and these will become males. Afterward, at the appropriate time, she will again fertilize eggs from her stored sperm of the year before, and