You may have seen a wasps' nest made of paper, suspended from a protected part of your house. These wasps who live in colonies and cooperate with one another are called social wasps.
There are other wasps who make nests for their young in an entirely different way. They do not live in colonies and are called solitary wasps. In another volume we learned of one called the black wasp caterpillar hunter. This female makes a nest in which to lay her eggs and provide for her young by digging a hole several inches deep in well-packed sand. At the bottom of this hole she lays her eggs. Then she hunts for a caterpillar which she paralyzes with her stinger and drops in the hole beside them. The caterpillar is still alive but cannot move, and when the eggs hatch out, the caterpillar becomes a fresh food supply for them.
It is common for various species to build similar nests, some of them dropping insects, spiders or caterpillars beside the eggs as a food supply when the larvae need it. Not one of all these wasps needs to be taught these things, nor experiment until it is done right, for these instincts are the Creator's gift to them, passed on from generation to generation.
One of the other varieties is known as the bembix wasp. Several of them make holes side by side in the ground to form colonies, digging with front feet specially designed by the Creator for this purpose. Each female wasp, after placing her eggs at the bottom of her nest, drops paralyzed flies down the hole. An interesting thing about bembix wasps is that after the eggs have hatched into larvae and eaten the food left for them, they cover themselves all over with a hard coating of fine sand held close to their bodies with sticky saliva. After being wrapped up that way through the winter months, they come out of this hard cocoon and crawl up into the outdoors as full-fledged wasps.
Sand and wood wasps follow habits similar to those of the bembix, but sometimes drill their holes in fence posts rather than in the ground. These particular wasps use paralyzed spiders and a few other insects for their food.
Another species feeds on nothing but paralyzed bees, which no doubt are very tasty to the larvae when they come out of their long sleep and find this food right beside them.
As we think how wonderfully the ways of the Lord God, the Creator of all things, are displayed, we can easily understand why Psalmist declared, after expressing the above verse 24, "I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.... I will be glad in the Lord" (Psa. 104:33-3433I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being. 34My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord. (Psalm 104:33‑34)). Are you among those who join in that kind of singing?