The Half-Wasp

On the brighter side of things, yellow jackets will kill and eat spiders.  On the darker side, yellow jackets are yellow jackets.  In addition to eating spiders, yellow jackets are drawn to sweets and meat—for this reason, they pester us at our picnics.  They are also aggressive.

Only a month ago, I got stung twice when I started hammering a roofing nail into the eave of a shed down at my lakefront.  After only a couple whacks of my hammer a swarm of the yellow jackets created a frightening halo around my head.  I jumped down from my ladder and loped off, but not before two yellow jackets found their mark.

I am not allergic.  I am, however, a pain averse whine-baby.

I whimpered a little.

Yellow jackets are not pain averse whine-babies.  As all insects, they are singular in focus and without fear.  Insects press on through all weather, all hardship, and all manner of injury.  A yellow jacket that I saw the other day illustrates this perfectly.  This particular yellow jacket was walking around on my drive with its entire abdomen missing.  Only the head and thorax of the hapless creature remained.  The yellow jacket’s all important stinger and its intestines were gone.

 

This did not seem to disturb the insect at all.

What fashion of battle or accident might have rendered the yellow jacket so?  How long had the creature been waddling about this way?  I watched the yellow jacket wander a few circles and then thread away into the nearby grass.

 

The insect world, as Annie Dillard demonstrates eloquently in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is a really a shop or horrors.  Insects brutalize one another interspecies and species to species.  As a young boy I often deposited hapless grasshoppers and beetles onto bustling red ant piles just to watch the appalling battles that exploded.   In this way I became an active player in the shop of horrors.  Within the pages of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard, shares the descriptions of J. Henri Fabre as he observed a bee-eating wasp attacking a honey bee:

If the bee is heavy with honey, the wasp squeezes its crop “so as to make her disgorge her delicious syrup, which she drinks by licking the tongue which her unfortunate victim, in her death agony, sticks out of her mouth at full length…At the moment of some such horrible banquet, I have seen the Wasp, with her prey, seized by the Mantis: the bandit was rifled by another bandit.  And here is an awful detail: while the Mantis held her transfixed under the points of the double saw and was already munching her belly, the Wasp continued to lick the honey off her Bee, unable to relinquish the delicious food even amid the terrors of death.”

A half-wasp walking about is nothing by comparison.

--Mitchell Hegman