“For where’s the state beneath the firmament
That doth excel the wasps’ for government.”
“What is not good for the swarm is not good for the wasp.”
As the tendency of mankind to crowd into cities grows stronger the joys of country life and the workings of Nature are more and more excluded from the daily experience of humanity. In a few the primal love of the wild is too strong for suppression, and turning from the hot and noisy streets they find it a refreshment of spirit to meet our little brothers of earth and air in the wider spaces of their own territory.
We were walking through the woods one hot day in the middle of August when our attention was attracted by a stream of yellow-jackets issuing from the ground. They came in such surprising numbers and looked so full of energy that we stopped to watch them, and this was our introduction to the study of these “bold sons of air and heat,” although a perusal of Fabre’s fascinating “Souvenirs Entomologiques” had prepared us to feel a lively interest in them. We were at our summer home near Milwaukee, where meadow and garden, with the wooded island in the lake close by, offered themselves as hunting grounds, while wasps of every kind, the socialistic tribes as well as the extreme individualists of the solitary species, were waiting to be studied.
