Lucille Raboin, age 12, of West Warwick, Rhode Island, for her question:
Where do hornets go in the cold weather?
All summer the hornets zoom through the greenery, especially in flowery gardens. These overgrown wasps are handsome insects, snappily dressed in velvety stripes of brown and yellow. But they are bad tempered bugs, always eager to sting both friends and enemies. Come fall, most of us are glad to see them depart from the scene.
The Chinese claim to have invented paper. But if hornets studied human affairs, they would laugh at this notion. For they invented paper making long before the human family came to dwell on this luxurious planet. They are, of course, social insects who live in hive communities somewhat like their smaller and more popular cousins, the honeybees. However, the honeybee hive is built of waxy combs and weather¬proofed with durable glue. It survives from season to season and so does the colony of honeybees. Hornets build their nests of paper made from chewed wood pulp. They inhabit it through only one summer and only one member of the family community survives to see the next season.
As the fall weather grows cooler, the hard working hornets begin to slow down and lose their vitality. The queen mother lays fewer eggs and the nursemaids do not care whether they tend the infants or not. Housekeeping chores and repair jobs are neglected. The papery nest becomes a sloppy mess littered with flaky debris and scraps of decaying caterpillar meat. The queen has her mind on mating with the drones and the regular routines of hive discipline are forgotten.
The sluggish workers give up their marketing trips outdoors and begin to perish one by one from hunger and cold. Soon only the queen is left. Before the first frost she deserts the papery nest, maybe because the place is in such a shambles. She flies off in search of a cozy hiding place and crawls into a crevice just big enough to hold her furry body. There she sleeps through the cold winter months, maybe deep within a hollow tree or securely hidden in the beams of a barn.
When spring returns, Her Majesty awakes and flies out into the warm sunshine. She searches for a high branch, an overhanging eave or some other suitable place for building a new nest for the coming summer. Then she gathers and chews up wood pulp to make a few papery cells. Into each cell she places an egg and waits about a week for the brood to hatch. She gathers caterpillar meat to feed the hungry grubs until they change i"o sleeping pupae. After 10 days, the pupae hatch into adult worker hornets. These spinster daughters immediately take over the duties of adding more papery cells, foraging for food and defending the family property. The queen mother retires to concentrate on laying eggs. During the summer, the hanging paper nest may grow bigger than a football and the queen may lay 25,000 eggs. However, the mortality rate among the busy workers is high and the hornet colony rarely reaches more than 5,000 members at a time.
After the queen departs, it is wise to tear down a hornets' nest. Its debris and decay attract flies, cockroaches and other unwelcome pests to the neighborhood. We tend to think only of the hornet's fiery sting, but the handsome insect is an ally in our gardens. As an adult she sips only nectar, spreading pollen as she visits the flowers. The hornet grubs eat caterpillar meat. The busy worker removes these greedy gobblers from the garden as she takes home food for the family.