STINGING INSECTS.
THE stings of wasps and bees and their relations are simpler instruments than the elaborate machinery by which jellyfish and some other sea beasts paralyse the creatures on which they feed, and occasionally inflame the skin of some unlucky bather, who finds himself smarting as if he had fallen into a bed of nettles. The jellyfish sting by means of stinging cells, each with a special apparatus lying ready for use inside it. Insects' stings are usually the " ovipositor " or egg-dropping tube sharpened up to act as a weapon, down the _ centre of which the poison is discharged. That is why only the females as a rule have stings. The poison of the bees, wasps, and hornets ,is only formic acid. The difference of its effect on different persons is probably due to individual constitution, just as one man still fresh to the drag can take large 'quantities of opium which might be fatal in a much smaller dose if given to another patient. That deadly septic poisoning should sometimes be set up by the bites of insects -which have been feeding on putrid matter is not unlikely. But that the tiny drop of venom in- serted by a. bee should have fatal results from time to time is surprising.
Bees are far more free in the use of their stings than wasps, and often go out on an expedition of the most criminal kind, as fully intending to use their deadly weapon as was the late Hr. Charles Peace when he went a-burgling with a revolver. Every now and then a swarm makes up its mind to burgle another hive and steal the honey. Robbery and bee-slaughter, if not murder in the first degree, are their object. They sting the raided swarm, and the latter sting the raiders, and when this has been going on every bee near the place is ready to "shoot at sight," so to speak, and
sting persons passing by. esides this, bees have fads and fancies about people whom they like and dislike. They will sting the latter quite unprovoked. At one house in Suffolk beei. could not be kept because the coachman, an old family servant, who also looked after one of the minor flower-gardens, was obnoxious to them. When the eldest son, who had a house near, succeeded to the property the bees were brought up to the hall garden; but it was very soon found that either they or the coachman must leave the premises, so the bees were sent home again. The massacre of the drones by bees is well known; the queen bees also search out and Put to death other young queens. It is noticed that some imported bees are mach worse tempered and more ready to sting than the British species. There are a number of honey-making bees which apparently do not use their stings, or in which the stings are atrophied and too blunt to hurt. Some are very small, so diminutive that they are called stssettito-bees. They gather quantities of honey, of which Bates, in one of the forests on the Amazon, took two quarts from one of the nests. In Jamaica, where some of these amiable bees are also found, they are called " angelitos,"— a name given them by the original Spanish settlers in honour of their good temper. Some Australian dwarf bees— also " angelitos so far as human beings are concerned— do not use their stings, perhaps because they are not sharp enough to hurt, but deal with their enemies something after the manner of the Quaker on board ship who refused to use a gun, but threw the Frenchmen overboard. An enemy is held down by several of the bees, who gradually put him on the rack by pulling his limbs out tight and keeping them so, for as long as an hour, by which time the prisoner "dies a natural death." Bumble-bees are popularly supposed not to sting. The males have no stings, but the females have, at any rate in the common bumble-bee. There are so many sizes in a bumble-bee's .nest, large females, small females, and males, that it is a safe speculation not to take the risk, though bumble-bees are very easy-going creatures and only sting when pressed or hurt.
The common wasp as a rule keeps its sting for self-defence. It will bite a fly in two with its jaws if it gets in its way on a window-pane, but it does not use its sting even when trying to rob a bee-hive and "tackled" by the bees. The latter will push a wasp away fire or six times, hustling it off the footboard, without provoking it to sting. But if a bee endeavours to sting a wasp, it then grapples with it and stings back, killing or benumbing the insect almost at once. British wasps are fussy and excitable but not vicious, like many of the Indian wild bees. However crowded or uncomfortable they may be, they very rarely quarrel with or sting each other, as, for instance, when a number are on the same window-pane, fretting and anxious to get out. Only when the entrance to their nest is threatened do they become actively aggressive, and then as a rule the attack is not begun till the person who excites their fear interposes between them and the entrance to the nest. A setter dog was noticed to turn and bite itself, whimpering with pain, just as the party were sitting down to a shooting luncheon by the side of a wood in Yorkshire. The dog being tired, had lain down on the hole of a wasps' nest, and five or six of the yellow insects were stinging it at once; but they did not touch the persons sitting close by. About the end of August country newspapers often con- tain a paragraph describing an unprovoked attack made by wasps from nests by the roadside. There is a family likeness about these stories, which are quite true, except that as a rule the attack is not unprovoked. The incident will be found generally to take place on a Sunday, and the victims to be part of the congregation returning from church. Any one acquainted with the ways of country villages will guess the history of the wasps' raid. The small boys of the village discover the nest after breakfast, and if they can shirk church, spend a delightful morning in stoning the wasps by long-range fire. The latter become angry, and then furious, and probably sting a boy or two. The latter then clear off, or do so in any case when the elders come out of church. The wasps seeing a number of people coming down the road, con- clude that they are going to carry on the attack begun during the earlier hours, and flying out, sting all and sundry, gaining a. reputation of the worst character for ever after.
The various species of "social" wasps found in England all spring from colonies founded by a single queen wasp early in the year. She feeds the early grubs herself, first on sugary extract of flowers, and later on flesh. This she gets by killing insects, which, so far as the writer has been able to observe, she does not sting, but kills by biting their heads off. The wasp then appears to feed upon the insect, usually some soft- bodied fly. What she really does is to bite the legs and wings off, and chew the rest into a kind of pulp, with which she flies off and feeds the larvse. But there are a number of solitary wasps which do sting other insects, and regularly use the sting for the special purpose of paralysing the caterpillars which they store up to serve as food for their grubs. Yet these armed solitary wasps, of which there are twice as many species in England as there are of the social wasps, never seem to sting man. One of them hauls out poisonous spiders from their holes by the leg, and then stings them just between their own poison-fans. The solitary wasps are as clever in using their stings as a Malay is with his crease ; but the victims are all insects. One, which stings cockroaches, and then stuffs them into keyholes and, other convenient
places, does not care to carry the cockroach. It just stings it enough to make it stupid, and then walks it off to prison like a policeman with a pickpocket. Hornets, which are only large wasps, are very different from the latter in tempera- ment, and far less active. This is matter for thankfulness, for the amount of poison emitted by a hornet is enough to cause most serious results. The pain is intense. The writer has seen a boy stung on the head faint at once from the shock. The results to some constitutions are so serious that the dread in which hornets are held is by no means unwar- ranted. But they are among the most sluggish of winged insects. They will sit for hours on a dying elm tree, apparently almost torpid, drinking the sweet sap, and if by chance one enters a house it will remain quietly on the window-pane, without any of the buzzing and fuss made by a bee or a wasp. In India a large black hornet with a red head is common in the hills. It has a strong pair of jaws, and is said to seize whatever it intends to sting with these, before inserting the poisoned dart. Europeans who have had fever, and are stung by one of these hornets, or by a centipede, often suffer from a new attack of fever immediately after the symptoms caused by the sting begin to decrease. The large scolopendra centipede, which sometimes grows from nine inches to a foot in length, is perhaps the most horrible of all stinging creatures. It has a pair of stinging feet, crooked, sharp, and venomous, which it sinks into the flesh bitten. As the creature is highly carnivorous, and may have been feeding on some putrid substance, not only the secreted venom, but also septic poison may enter. Death is said to have often followed the sting. The scorpion's sting, though it causes torturing pain, is less serious.
• Ants are popularly supposed not to sting, but only to bite. This is a mistake, for though many of them bite and inject poison into the wound, the ants, properly speaking, belong to the stinging hymenoptera, and are related to the bees and wasps, and others of that class whose females have stings and a poison gland, though in many of the ants the sting has become " blind " or disappeared, just as their wings have, though in some kinds poison is still discharged from the end of the tail. In the bulldog ants of Australia and elsewhere the sting is perfectly developed, and as the creature is an inch long and the poison powerful, the effects of many stings are often very severe.
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