A Few More Waspish Facts

Before I Move on to the Poems (Audio)

A Few More Waspish Facts Before I Move On

Of the 30,000 species of wasp, seventeen make honey—although usually in very small amounts.¹ Among them are the black paper wasp, and the Mexican honey wasp (which is also a paper wasp).

Mexican honey wasps build hexagonal cells in their spiral nest, and the female workers collect honeydew and the pollen from sources like avocado trees², sunflowers and mesquite³ to make honey. This is the only wasp that can produce honey on the same scale as honey bees do.⁴

These small wasps are hairier than other species, and for that reason are, like bees, better pollinators. (Remember the wasps when you’re enjoy your next avocado).

The Mexican honey wasps’ honey and larvae themselves are considered a delicacy by people in some regions of the country. The dish is called“Panal Miniagua”, and it’s eaten with salsa and tortillas.

The nests are only harvested for this purpose “when the moon is between its last quarter and waning gibbous.”⁵ It’s thought to have something to do with the size of the larvae at this time.

In Japan, some people farm wasps. They collect small nests in the spring, bring them home and put them in wooden boxes. Throughout the summer and autumn, they feed the workers with sugar water, honey, and raw chicken. The nests are harvested in late autumn, when the larvae are at their largest and “most delicious”. There’s a fascinating article about the preparation of the sweet, nutty “gohei mochi” at The Splendid Table website (audio).⁶

This approach to edible insects is far from futuristic, and it’s definitely not efficient enough to feed the world’s growing population. In fact, so much of wasp culture in Kushihara is centered on being in the present moment: in a certain place at a certain time. Wasps are, more than anything, a fleeting mark of the fall season. You spend months cultivating the nests just for that moment when you pop a raw larvae into your mouth and it bursts into a flash of honey butter.⁷

Sliding slightly off course, pulled by a misleading article, I found that when honey is made from the pollen of rhododendrons, the result is “Mad Honey”. When you eat it, you just might see god—or whatever you subconscious wants to show you. While it’s rarely deadly, it can cause hallucinations and loss of motor control.

One of the first instances of biological warfare was recorded in 65 BCE, when Mithridates VI, who was also known as The Poisoner King, used honey to defeat an entire Roman column. Bowls of mad honey were left along the roadside, and when the Romans were seeing visions, stumbling, and vomiting, they were easily defeated.⁸

Mithridates won the battle, though not the war.

Although I wasn’t able to find a second, more credible source to an instant of wasp honey poisoning, it’s possible. Not only is the rhododendron a problem, but the honeysuckle azalea, and the calico bush will also poison the honey.⁹ Researchers have found that the honey of the Mexican honey wasp has been tainted on occasion with pollen from the toxic nightshade Datura.¹⁰

A honey wasps’ nest, the size of a basketball, has housed as many as 18,000 wasps, and 1,529 queens. These wasps differ from others in terms of their lifecycle. They remain in the nest perpetually, from year to year. (Unless farmers knock them from the fruit trees during the harvest.) The honey allows the entire colony to survive the winter.

Another exceptional fact: each honey wasp queen mates with a single male.

I’ve found that there is no normal for wasps. There are so many variations in terms of what it takes for each, individual species to stay alive.

It’s been easier to return to the wasp research than it has been to dig into the history of Vermont’s eugenics. It’s easier to think about the parasitic wasps, feeding their offspring, than it is to imagine the lives connected to these isolated statistics:

In the state of Vermont, between 1931 and 1941, 200 people were sterilised without their consent.

Poor and socially ostracized families were targeted for investigation of the three D’s (delinquency, dependency, and mental defect). These families usually lived outside the accepted moral or social convention of middleclass America. The three D’s were used to target the poor, the disabled, French-Canadians, and Native Americans. Women were targeted more than men. […] Families who were notorious for having illegitimate and/or "defective" children were targeted, as were those notorious for illiteracy, incest, and for having institutionalized family members (Eugenics Survey in Vermont: Studies). 

The people who began this push for eugenic legislation were called The American Breeder’s Association.

Really.

“Scholarly research has determined that people who found themselves targets of the eugenics movement were those who were seen as unfit for society—the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, and specific communities of color—and a disproportionate number of those who fell victim to eugenicists' sterilisation initiatives were women who were identified as African American, Asian American, or Native American.”¹¹

Talk about a wasps nest. There are so many books in these stories, but those aren’t my stories to tell, though there are so many ways to witness. I expect that I’ll need to confront the uncomfortable truths before setting boundaries. For me. For the book.

“Fitter Families for Future Firesides”. These were competitions that included the judging of children on everything from generosity and self-sacrifice, to jealousy and high-temperedness. The competitions were sponsored by The Red Cross, and judged by local medical practitioners.

This continued until World War II.

I think about my grandmother’s life during this time period. Having spent her childhood in service as a maid, then in a “children’s home”¹² in Virginia. As a teenager and into her early twenties, she worked in the cafeteria of the Brattleboro Retreat, an asylum for the insane, founded in 1834.

Vermont’s first mental institution, the Vermont Asylum for the Insane (the Brattleboro Retreat), was founded in 1834 to provide the Quaker “moral treatment” to Vermont’s mentally ill. […] The Vermont State Asylum for the Insane (the Waterbury Hospital) was founded in 1888. These public institutions set the stage for eugenics to take hold in Vermont because they appeared to support the conclusion that “degeneracy” was increasing in the state due to poor heredity.¹³

On the cusp of World War II, my grandmother was an uneducated, single mother¹⁴ with one nearly-grown daughter. I wonder: when she lay in that hospital bed with the 12-week fetus of a boy in her bursting fallopian tube, how did she escape sterilisation?

Which tests was she given as a child? My grandmother who undervalued her intelligence. Who most often didn’t want to understand.

And then there’s our family history of madness.

This is, I think, the driest entry in the process journal so far. I’m taking it as a sign that it’s time to move on to writing—to let all these fragments find their own connections.

I’m working on an original adaptation of the Petrarchan sonnet, which I’ll call a wasp sonnet.

More on that next week. Until then: thank you for reading! (And sweet dreams).

Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen takes its cue from Nature, whose matter-of-fact dramas can be seen from shifting points of view & embracing the paradox of acceptance and hope. ❧ Beetles & Bombs | Poetry & Plays ❧

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1. https://www.smorescience.com/do-wasps-make-honey/

2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Mexican-Honey-Wasp-Brachygastra-mellifica-collects-nectar-from-avocado_fig4_228506735

3. https://beeswiki.com/mexican-honey-wasps/

4. https://www.iflscience.com/the-mexican-honey-wasp-can-produce-honey-just-as-good-as-any-bee-72749

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachygastra_mellifica#:~:text=Source%20of%20food,-Brachygastra%20mellifica%20serve&text=The%20Spanish%20local%20name%20for,last%20quarter%20and%20waning%20gibbous.

6. https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2019/02/08/the-japanese-tradition-of-raising-and-eating-wasps

7. Ibid.

8. https://www.iflscience.com/mad-honey-once-poisoned-an-entire-roman-military-column-with-deadly-consequences-68755

9. https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/info/can-honey-be-poisonous.htm#:~:text=Poisonous%20honey%20occurs%20when%20bees,humans%20who%20eat%20the%20honey.

10. https://beeswiki.com/mexican-honey-wasps/

11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

12. These were homes for orphans and for the children of the indigent (using the contemporary vocabulary). My grandmother was the latter, her father having died in the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1921.

13. https://vermonthistory.org/journal/87/VH8701SegregationOrSterilization.pdf

14. My grandmother would be upset if I didn’t make it clear that she was married when each of her children were conceived. I am not sure of the exact dates of each of her separations and divorces, but I know that she was alone when her unfathomably long ectopic pregnancy made the medical journals.