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Agitated editors and assistant editors ran up and down tortuous staircases bawling things about "wasps."
The insects do many things that look like intelligence, yet how these things differ from human intelligence may be seen in the case of one of our solitary wasps, the mud-dauber, which sometimes builds its cell with great labor, then seals it up without laying its egg and storing it with the accustomed spiders. Intelligence never makes that kind of a mistake, but instinct does.
The various species of Chrysopa or Lace-winged flies, appear during this month. The Insects of July. During mid-summer the bees and wasps are very busy building their nests and rearing their young.
"Now, Harry, you know I'm older than you, and you carried them here, so you ought to give way," said Philip. "Why," said Harry, "we ought neither of us to do it, because Cousin Fred's here, and he's a visitor. Here, Fred," he said, holding out the bellows, "you do it." "Do what?" said Fred, staring. "I don't know what you are going to do." "Why, take the wasps' nest in that old touchwood tree.
Its young is, however, an insect-eater; but the Monedula does not, like other burrowing or sand wasps, put away a store of insects or spiders, partially paralyzed, as a provision for the grub till it reaches the pupa state; it actually supplies the grub with fresh-caught insects as long as food is required, killing the prey it captures outright, and bringing it in to its young; so that its habits, in this particular, are more bird- than wasp-like.
The true communities founded by wasps and hornets must be assigned to a low grade in the scale because they originate during a single season and break up at its end; for this very reason the wasp community is intensely interesting to the student of comparative social evolution.
The bodies are fried in oil with onions and preserved shrimps, or sometimes alone, and are considered a great delicacy. In Borneo, Celebes, and many other islands, the larvae of bees and wasps are eaten, either alive as pulled out of the cells, or fried like the dragonflies. The superabundance of insect life is therefore turned to some account by these islanders.
Instinct acts more in the invariable way of a machine. Certain of the solitary wasps bring their game spider, or bug, or grasshopper and place it just at the entrance of their hole, and then go into their den apparently to see that all is right before they carry it in.
Are the hosts of little beings really responsible; have they not evolved into a pocket, a mental cul-de-sac, a swamping of individuality, pooling their personalities? And what is it they have gained what pledge of success in food, in safety, in propagation? They are not separate entities, they have none of the freedom of action, of choice, of individuality of the solitary wasps.
Before I report the results obtained in the cage, let us for a moment stop to consider the normal conditions of the labours that fall to the lot of the Necrophori. The Beetle does not select his head of game, choosing one in proportion to his strength, as do the predatory Wasps; he accepts it as hazard presents it to him.
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