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It is the third secret of the woods. The Mud-dauber Wasp If you look under the roof of any wooden barn in Eastern America you are likely to see the nest of the common Mud-wasp. If you look on warm sunny days along the edge of some mud puddle you are sure to see a curious steel-blue wasp, with a very thin waist, working away at a lump of mud.
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 nuthatch, called here the "mud-dauber," from its habit of narrowing the hole of a starling's old nest, with mud, for its own use as a nesting-place, is a more common bird in the Forest than in Worcestershire.
Pelopæus, the Mud-dauber, is now building its earthen cells, plastering them on old rafters and stone walls. The Selandria vitis attacks the vine, while Selandria rosæ, the Rose slug, injures the rose. The leaves should be sprinkled with a mixture of whale-oil soap and water, in the proportion of two pounds of soap to fifteen gallons of water.
You will learn that in South America the lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene fungus, or Phallus, taints the tropical forests, as a similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their young, just as in North America.
And it explained the countless things which happily enable a commander to keep himself as busy as a mud-dauber, however idle the camp or however torn his own heart.
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