“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.”
Wasps have not won for themselves a good name. No one likes them. Most people detest them. Many people never see them without wanting to kill them. And yet, really, they are very useful creatures, and, if the truth were known, they probably do a great deal more good in the world than harm.
Besides which, they cannot be said to be bad-looking. It is not their looks which get them disliked. In their coats of glittering black and gold, with their gossamer wings and knowing little heads and slender waists, they are very beautiful indeed.
How is it then that they have not got a better reputation? For we might certainly apply the proverb to them, “Give a wasp a bad name and knock her down.”
Well, I think that the first reason is that “they have tails and stings,” like some queer creatures that are described in the Book of Revelation. As a little boy once said about them, “they hurt where they sit down.”
Another reason is that they are very fond of fruit. The owner of orchards knows that. He goes to his apple trees one fine morning, and he finds choice apples, which are nothing but skin and core. The wasps have been inside, and cleared out the whole of the nice sweet juicy fruit. But, after all, we must admit that it is very cleverly done. And wasps are not so bad as greedy birds, who will eat all the damsons off a tree. Or like mice, who will come into the cellar where the apples are stored, and nibble first one apple and then another, spoiling every one they touch, and never finishing any. Wasps will come back again and again to the same apple, and finish their work properly. And it is very little harm they do, compared with the good.
But the thing which has spoilt their good name more than anything else is their quick temper. One would have thought that the amount of sugar that they like in their food would have helped to sweeten their disposition, but it is not so. They are a great trouble to housekeepers when there is any sugar about. When the good wife is making jams, or cakes, or puddings, and the wasps come in and besiege the pots and basins, and she gets flurried and whisks a cloth at them, and they get angry and buzz round her, and she has to run out of the way because she does not care to be, stung—that is the way that they earn a bad reputation. If anyone happens to be stung by a wasp, he never forgets it. For, sometimes it is very dangerous, and at all times very painful.
Now, let me tell you something about wasps that will help you to have a better idea of them.
1. They are very wonderful and very clever creatures. God has made them for a special purpose, and He has fitted them exactly for the work He has given them to do. In the springtime, the queen wasp comes out of the hole in the ground, or from the sheltered nook under a stone, where she has been asleep all the winter, and flies around to find the best place in which to build her nest. She generally fixes on some nice quiet little burrow that a mouse or other creature has once used. When she has found it, she goes off to some wood palings, and tears off enough wood to make a sort of wood pulp, out of which she turns the paper covering for the cells she has to build. In these cells she lays her eggs. When the eggs are hatched, she has to feed her young, and very hard she has to work. When the young wasps are old enough, they begin to help the queen build more cells. And so the nest grows, tier on tier of cells, with the openings downwards, and with passages between each story. A truly wonderful structure it is, when finished, and manufactured, all of it, out of wood pulp. If anyone kills a wasp in summertime, it only counts for one. But if he kills a wasp in the spring, it means 10,000 wasps destroyed, for that wasp will be a queen wasp that is busy making her nest, and rearing her young.
2. They are very useful in the garden and the orchard. Their stings are given them, not to sting people with, but to sting and kill their prey. And they feed on flies and maggots and caterpillars. A wasp will attack a caterpillar three or four times her own size, and carry it off to her nest. Now, caterpillars are great plagues in a garden; they will go on eating until they ruin a tree. Maggots, too, are killed by wasps, and maggots are nothing but nuisances; they creep into the fruit and into the trees, and destroy them. Flies carry disease with them into our houses, but the wasps kill them and help to keep their number down.
Wasps, then, are more the friends of the gardener than his enemies. And if they ask for an occasional plum or peach for wages, or if they take them without asking, it is not so very unreasonable. When, of course, they positively swarm in numbers, after a long dry summer, as they have done this year, they do not limit their demands to one or two things. But that is only because there are so many of them, and they can’t help that, and they can’t help being hungry either.
3. They are really very gentle creatures, and, generally speaking, will never sting anyone who does not interfere with them. They only ask for a little sweet stuff; they are very clean, and will do no harm, if they are left alone. But they are very sensitive, and very highly strung, as we should say, and so they are quickly irritated. And when they are hit, or when any of their number is hurt, their temper quickly rises. But I don’t think that is very strange, for they have never been taught, like you, to control their temper.
And so, the great lesson that I learn from the wasp is this. It doesn’t matter how clever you are, or how useful, or how really kind at heart, it may all be spoilt by a bad temper. The wasp has lost her good name, entirely by her quick temper. People forget all about her pretty dress, and her delicate poise and her elegant ways. They forget all about her cleverness, her usefulness, and her gentleness. Indeed, they don’t believe she is gentle. They only remember that she is a regular little vixen for her fiery temper, and they don’t like her.
A good temper is one of the greatest treasures you can have; indeed it is great riches.
“There’s not a cheaper thing on earth, nor yet one
half so dear,
‘Tis worth more than distinguished birth, or
thousands gained a year,
A charm to banish grief away, to snatch the
brow from care,
Turn tears to smiles, make dullness gay, spread
gladness everywhere,”