WASPS!

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The queen lays an egg in each cell, and as she lays each egg, she also releases a sperm cell from the supply that she's carrier in her body since she mated the previous fall. A few days later, the fertilized eggs hatch and the queen feeds the larvae bits of chewed-up insects. She continues providing the grubs with a bug burger diet for the next week to three weeks—after which the larvae spin cocoons and transform into pupae. A week to three weeks later, they emerge as adults.

The first brood of the season, and most of the subsequent broods, are sterile females, workers who take over nest building and all other duties except egg laying, which becomes the queen's only job. In her single-season lifetime, a queen hornet or yellow jacket may lay as many as 25,000 eggs.

By July and August, paper wasp nests are . . . well, a beehive of activity. The population of a hornet or yellow jacket nest may number in the thousands. ( Polistes colonies seldom exceed several hundred.) Workers busily shuttle back and forth, some delivering chewed-up prey to larvae while others work to expand the nest. On hot days, some workers fan the nest with their wings, and sometimes even carry water from puddles and pools and sprinkle it on the cell walls to keep the colony cool. At its peak, a mature colony of paper wasps, with hundreds or thousands of individuals working together, driven to cooperation by eons of evolved instinct, seems like one solitary creature—a pulsating paper organism with a single purpose and a hundred thousand legs.

Pioneers hung wasp nests to control houseflies.

But by late summer, for reasons not entirely understood, the society begins to deteriorate. More and more pupae emerge as males or fertile females rather than as sterile female workers. The reproductive wasps take little part in caring for the colony, and gradually the remaining workers lose interest in the larvae and abandon them, or sometimes even feed on them. The queen, exhausted, dies. Eventually, all the males and fertile females leave the nest to mate. The workers remain but, left with little strength, perish one by one. The males, too, die after mating. In the end, only the reproductive females, each already carrying the live sperm that will produce next season's colonies, survive to hibernate and perpetuate the cycle.

Wasps, it seems, like so many other creatures branded "dangerous" by man, are only struggling to survive, following the tyranny of their genes, no more bad than beneficial, no more harmful than harmless.

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