A Queen Begins. With a Wasp-Waist. From Nothing. Alone.

Process Journal (Audio)

Insects are living metaphors for me. They’re so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don’t have any human or mammalian instincts. They’ll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There’s no empathy – none.

Guillermo del Toro.

This project I’ve picked up again, is all about women. About maternal lines. It’s something of a memoir, but not.

It’s all about wasps. And I see metaphors everywhere.

But unlike Guillermo del Toro, I don’t think wasps lack emotions, or human instincts (whatever those are). On the contrary. I think we’ve drawn those kinds of conclusions about insects due to our own wilful suppression of empathy. We clear a nest from the yard, with a clear conscience, so we can have our picnic. We eat our tomato salads, not realising the debt we owe the wasps for our tomatoes. We’ll give bees their due now, it’s true, but we extend nothing to the wasp.

Insects have no empathy?

We, as a species, destroy one another’s homes. And one another’s children. For land, for oil, for ideologies.

We destroy our own children often enough for it to be relevant to mention.

We’ll look the other way at the drop of a hat: we ignore what our neighbors do, what our governments do.

I think that the filmmaker’s use of insects as metaphors is powerful because we see in them exactly what we are too frightened to admit to seeing in ourselves. We use them as surrogates, and aim our moral outrage at them, while professing they have no morality. No wasps’ rights, and no wasps’ wrongs.

But scientists recently demonstrated that wasps employ logical deductions. And, yet, if you swat one, they will still call out to the other workers for help.

I love the paradox apparent all of these facts. They are strange creatures.

And we are strange creatures. Often so ugly we want not to recognise ourselves.

But it’s likely wasps can recognise us. We know that social wasps recognise one-another’s faces.

These wasps, as a colony, are devoted to the queen’s offspring. The workers risk their lives hunting for the larvae. But sometimes, just sometimes, a worker wasp will escape to find a way to procreate on her own.

Doesn’t this imply a kind of personality? In as much as personality exists in us, too? Isn’t this the model of one of our own hero’s stories?

It’s moving to watch a nature documentary directed from the lioness’s point of view. She hunts for her hungry cubs. We’re caught up in the suspense, the pounce, the victory. Then we watch another—but told from the wildebeest’s point of view.

We are inconstant allies. Suckers for a bit of music. A heart-wrenching narrative.

The narrative of both bees and wasps is that every hive or colony has a Queen, whom all the workers and drones serve. But that’s only one perspective.

A new queen begins her adult life with fertilisation. In some species, this happens before she even emerges from her cell fully-formed. In late summer, as the other wasps are dying, she leaves the hive to find a place to hibernate alone through the winter. Often wedging herself under a bit of tree bark. In spring, she builds a new nest, mouthful by mouthful of bark and spit. She’ll build enough cells on her own, to be able to lay the fertilized eggs and produce a first brood of worker wasps. She’ll then spend the rest of her life laying eggs. She’ll die when the last broods have produced and fertilized new queens.

I think of the absurdist playwright Jean Genet’s ideas about power and wonder who is working in whose service here. Why have we chosen to call this wasp’s role “Queen”?

I remember those last months of pregnancy. The unwieldiness of my body. Breathing was difficult. I imagine what it might have been like to have had those months last the better part of a year. Have had them last half my life. I think of the real stories of history’s queens. Those traded into marriage. Betrayed, beheaded, whose lives were distorted by gossips and historians. Queen Victoria had nine children. Queen Dejane of Georgia, 23.

Queen Anne lived to lose 21.

Some scientists talk of altruism among social creatures. But paper wasps beat one another’s heads to establish a hierarchy. How can we possibly guess at a wasp’s motivation to serve the colony?

I read this morning something that I was sure was a mistake: the cylinder that the new queen makes as the start of a new hive is called a petiole. I thought this was a mistake because that is the name of the part of a wasp’s body that is the narrowest. Where we got the phrase “wasp-waisted” to describe extremely tight corsets in the 19^th century.

It makes me wonder if every social wasps’ nest is a monument to their own species. A remembrance of what had come before.

Or is it simply a single female wasp trying to leave her mark on the world. Her image.

There are more than 30.000 species of wasps. 20.000 are solitary.

Some solitary wasps are positively maternal. A mother will return to her mud nest to check on her larva, to see if it needs another caterpillar or two before it pupates. I’ve never seen a documentary about a mason wasp and her eggs. The work it takes her, sometimes only to produce a male who live a few weeks. He’ll mate, but never learn how to fend for himself, nor tend to others.

In my family fragments, the men come and go, and paternity is claimed, forgotten, and ultimately irrelevant. Dead, divorced, disappeared.

And, you see, when my grandmother was nine, her mother dropped her off to clean someone’s house for room and board. She stopped in again a year later to see how her daughter was fairing. Not well enough, I guess. She moved my grandmother to an orphanage, where her afternoon chore was to sweep the spiny caterpillars from the walkways. She told me those were the best years of her life.

What I’m saying is that there is such a thing as a cuckoo wasp. It’s exactly what you think it is.

References:

The image is from wikipedia and belongs in the public domain.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/paper-wasp

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2201863-wasps-are-the-first-invertebrates-seen-to-use-a-type-of-logic/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/07/in-defence-of-wasps-misunderstood-insect

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/worker-wasps-sneak-out-lay-their-eggs-neighboring-nests-180958300/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne,_Queen_of_Great_Britain#:~:text=Anne's%20final%20pregnancy%20ended%20on,before%20the%20age%20of%20two.