“Yes, your grandma was.  She’s naturally curious about such things, and came with your grandpa to see the sight.  One half-stupified wasp settled on her hair, and she didn’t know it; but after she got back to the house it revived a bit and moved, and she, not knowing what it was, touched it, and it stung her badly on the top of her head.  I don’t think wasps will sting unless they are touched; but they are such creepy things that you don’t always know where they are, and you are apt to touch them without meaning to do so.”

The next morning at breakfast Jack was talking about the wasp’s nest that he had seen on the evening before at the gardener’s cottage.  Grandma remarked, “There is a kind of wasp called the mason wasp, which bores holes several inches deep in sand-banks.  The inside of this long narrow passage is covered with a gummy paste which the wasp makes with her mouth.  Here she lays her eggs, and then brings some green caterpillars into the holes, ready for the young wasps to eat when they come out of the egg.  Then she closes the holes by a ball of sand, so that nothing can get in to eat the young grub.  Sometimes these wasps choose a brick wall instead of a sand-bank for their eggs.

“A friend of mine watched one of these wasps in a wall in her garden.  She saw the wasp go into a small round hole in the mortar between the bricks.  After a few minutes she walked out of the hole, turned round, and went in again backwards.  There she stayed, her little horns and bright eyes being all that could be seen of the wasp.  My friend tried to make the wasp come out of the hole, but nothing could move her; so then she had to go away, but not before she had put a mark by the spot.

“The next morning she went back to the wall and found the wasp had gone, and had carefully and cleverly covered up her hole with what looked like mortar.

“The lady then took a pen-knife and scraped away this door to the hole.  She then put in a fine crochet-hook, and out tumbled no fewer than fifteen small green living caterpillars.  At last, quite at the back of the hole, she found a small oval thing, something like an ant’s egg, only more transparent.  That was the wasp’s egg; and the caterpillars were for its food when it was hatched, which would be in about three weeks.”

“Don’t wasps make honey?” asked Annie.

“No; the common wasp feeds her very young grubs upon the sweet juice of ripe fruit; in fact they like fruit over-ripe, and that is why they choose plums and pears and peaches that have fallen down to the ground.  It is dangerous to eat any ripe fruit that has fallen, without first looking to see if there is a wasp inside it.

“But the young wasps soon want green caterpillars and flies to eat, and many a blue-bottle fly is killed by wasps.”

“If wasps don’t store up honey for the winter, what do they live upon when there are no insects about?” asked Mary.

“When the fruit is all gone, and the nights get cold, about the beginning of October, then some instinct tells them what to do, for only a few of them live through the winter.