One morning when Teddy was spinning his top on the front walk, a big blue wasp flew buzzing over his head. Teddy was frightened at first, but he did not need to be.
The wasp paid no attention to Teddy.
It was not long before the wasp came back again, straight to the same corner of the porch. After a minute she flew away again, just as before.
The next time the wasp came flying back, Teddy dropped his top and cord, and climbed up on the porch railing. He wanted to see what she was doing. But he did not get very close, for he was afraid she might sting him.
The wasp flew off again. But she left something behind her. What Teddy saw was a little mud tube stuck against the porch ceiling.
The tube was like a little cave, just long enough to hold a wasp. Teddy ran into the house and told his mother that a blue wasp was building a mud house for herself under the porch roof.
The next day and the next Teddy saw the wasp flying back and forth. He thought she was making a very big house for one wasp. She made another room and another and another. By and by there were five rooms stuck close together. There were three rooms side by side with two on top.
Teddy wondered where the wasp got the mud to make its rooms. One day he found out. He was sailing his boat in the little stream that ran through the meadow near his home. Suddenly a blue wasp alighted on the bank not four feet away.
At first Teddy thought the wasp had come for a drink. Then he thought she had come to eat the wet dirt on the bank. But he saw that she was neither eating nor drinking. She was carrying a little ball of mud. She was holding it with her jaws and her front feet. She had dug it up with her strong sharp jaws.
The next minute the wasp flew off, still holding the mud ball. Teddy saw that she was headed straight for his house. He thought she must be the wasp that was making the little mud house on his front porch.
Day after day Teddy watched the wasp and her mud house on the porch ceiling. She worked steadily until there were five rooms. Then she did not make the house any larger.
Even after it was finished, the wasp kept flying to and from her house. She went inside one of the rooms for a little while. Then out she came and off she flew again.
Teddy thought the little wasp carried something in her front feet and jaws when she flew to the house. But he was not sure, and he was afraid to get close enough to find out.
One day when the wasp was nowhere in sight, Teddy climbed up on the porch railing for another look at the house. But the little mud house did not look just as it had the last time he had looked at it closely.
There had been a hole opening into the front of each little tube, like a little door. But now every one of the rooms was shut. The doors were all plastered over with mud. Teddy thought that what he had seen the wasp carrying must have been the mud to shut up the doors.
Not long after that Teddy’s father sent for some painters to come and paint the porch. When the painters started to work, they knocked down the wasp’s house. Teddy found it lying on the porch floor that afternoon when he came home from school.
little bits of dry mud. Scattered in the midst of the dirt were a lot of spiders, stretched out on their backs.
The spiders looked as if they were dead, but Teddy thought he saw one of them move its legs a little. He thought they must have been killed when the mud house fell. He wondered whether they had been sleeping inside the wasp’s house.
Teddy did not know what to think of it at all. All the time he had thought this was a wasp’s nest, and here it was full of spiders. Had a spider driven the wasp away and taken the house for her own children? Or had the wasp adopted a lot of little spiders who had no mother and made this cozy home for them? Teddy wondered about it a great deal.
After that Teddy found some more mud houses very much like this one. Some of them were in the woodshed. Some were in his grandmother’s attic. Some were under the top rail of the board fence.
Some of the mud houses Teddy saw looked like lumps of mud with four or five round holes for doors. Others looked like little tubes lying together in neat, straight rows, with all the holes at one end.
In some of the mud houses the little doors were open. In others they were closed. Teddy knocked down one of them to see whether it, too, held spiders. And sure enough it did. But when he broke open another one, he found that it held little grubs.
Teddy often saw wasps flying about other mud houses that he found, but they were not always blue wasps. Sometimes they were blue, and sometimes they were brown and yellow. Teddy thought it was all very queer. Now how did those spiders and grubs get there? That is what this story is going to tell.
The mud wasp does not build her nest for herself. She does not build it for spiders either. She builds it for her babies. Her babies are tiny eggs at first. Then these eggs hatch into tiny white grubs.
The grubs must have plenty to eat if they are to grow. All babies are like that, whether they are human babies, or baby birds, or baby ants, or baby bees, or baby wasps.
Mother birds bring insects and worms to their babies till the little ones are able to fly and find food for themselves. The queen bumblebee or the little worker sisters bring honey to the tiny grubs in the bee’s nest. Mother butterflies lay their eggs on leaves so that their babies will have food.
The mud wasp mother, also, sees that her babies get plenty of food. Her way of getting it is something like the way the mother moths and butterflies get food for their babies.
But the mother wasp does not get food in quite the same way, for her babies eat different food from that of the caterpillar. Caterpillars eat leaves. Mud wasp babies eat spiders, caterpillars, and other insects.
Mud wasps, moths, and butterflies all get the food ready for their babies before the babies are hatched. Indeed, they have it ready before they lay their eggs.
The moths and butterflies do this by putting their eggs on the leaves which their babies will need to eat. First they find the kind of bush or tree they want their babies to live on, then they lay the eggs on the leaves.
In the same way, the mud wasp must first find the food her babies will need to eat. Then she lays her eggs on the food.
There are different kinds of mud wasps, and their babies eat different things. Some of them eat caterpillars. The blue wasp’s grubs eat spiders.
If Teddy had known that, he might have thought how the spiders came to be in the mud wasp’s house. The wasp had put them there.
Each room in the wasp’s little mud house is made for a baby wasp. Every one of these babies must have plenty to eat. That is why the mother wasp puts the spiders there.
As soon as a mother mud wasp finishes her mud rooms, off she flies to the spider webs in the gardens and meadows. The spiders she likes best build beautiful round webs, like wheels.
Straight into the web flies the wasp. The pretty black and yellow spider hides close by, waiting for a fly or moth to get itself caught in her trap.
All of a sudden the spider feels her web shaking. Up she comes, running
Poor little spider, she little knows what is in her trap! As soon as the spider runs into sight, the wasp pulls its feet loose from the sticky web. Then it jumps on top of the spider and drives its sting deep into the spider’s body.
The sting does not kill the spider. It puts her to sleep by its poison. She can move her feet a little as Teddy saw the spiders on his porch doing, but she will never wake again.
If the spiders were dead, they would soon spoil. Before the baby wasps were ready to eat them, they would not be fit to eat.
So the mother wasp does not kill the spiders. Her way is better than that. The spiders will be fresh and good to eat when the little grubs are ready for them. But the spiders will not be able to move, or hurt the baby wasps.
After the mud wasp has stung the spider, she flies off with it to her house. She puts it into a room, or cell, and flies away for another.
Back and forth she flies, till there are enough spiders in each cell for each little grub’s food. Wasp grubs must eat a great deal. Often there are sixteen or seventeen spiders packed into one cell.
When she has enough spiders, the mud wasp lays one egg in each cell. She lays it on the heap of food. After that she flies away for mud to close the door of the cell.
In the same way the wasp brings enough spiders for all the other cells. If she does not find the spiders in their webs, she looks for them in all the places where spiders stay. She hunts in the leaves and branches. She must have spiders, and she does not stop hunting till she finds them.
When all the mud cells are packed with spiders, the eggs laid, and the cell doors closed, the mother wasp’s work is done. Her babies are safe in their beds, and they cannot fall out. How could they, when the cells are all shut up tight?
The mother does not have to stay near by to feed her babies. There is plenty of food stored away ready for them. It will stay fresh and good till the grubs need it. There is nothing left for the grubs to do but to eat the food and they can do that without any help from their mothers.
Sure enough, that is what the grubs do as soon as they are hatched. By and by the grubs have eaten all the sixteen or seventeen spiders. Soon there is nothing left in a cell but a fat grub and a few dry spider legs.
Then the grub spins a little silken cocoon, as so many insect babies do. Inside this cocoon it settles down and sleeps for several days.
Then at last comes a day when the grub has slept long enough. Its skin bursts, and out comes a blue mud wasp.
But how is this mud wasp to get out of its cell? The door is closed with mud, which became hard and dry while the grub slept.
Hard or not, it makes no difference. For this new mud wasp has strong sharp jaws, just as its mother had. It sets to work, and soon breaks down the mud door. Then it flies out into the air.
In the same way every baby in the mud wasp’s nest makes its way out of its cocoon. All that is left is the old nest, with its open doors. There is nothing inside but the old skin, and maybe some little pieces of dried up spider legs.
Nguồn: Wikisource English — By the Roadside (Dunn and Troxell)/A House Full of Spiders. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.