Architecture

Now that most of the leaves have fallen, it’s a good time to start looking for bald-faced hornet nests. These two samples are from Prospect Park.
These nests are abandoned each year, so they are harmless in winter. Wasp queens are the only ones who survive the winter, and they do it underground, or deep within leaf-litter, or under bark.

I have been reading the utterly fascinating and thought-provoking Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence by James R. Gould & Carol Grant Gould. It is about silk, social insects, bird nests and bird bowers, the civil engineering of beavers, problem-solving corvids, spatial and cognitive mapping, behavior, learning… well, it’s actually not a very long book, but it is deep, struggling towards some fundamental issues of intelligence.

For instance. The paper wasp species, including the bald-faced, build their comb facing down. So why don’t the larva just fall out, going to gravity’s destiny? Well, the combs are made of paper, which is mostly cellulose, and hence very electrostatic; wet things like larva and food just stick to it. Water loves paper. The social bees (honey and the stingless bee species), meanwhile, who make their comb out of wax, align their comb horizontally. Water and wax do not love each other: the larva would slip out if the comb were aligned downwards.

And about that wax; an ounce of it, made into hexagonal comb, can support a full two pounds of honey, pollen, larva, etc. Such strength comes at great cost, however: a bee needs to eat about 14 oz of sugar — which equals about 4.5 pounds of pollen — to synthesize that one ounce of wax. But the bees need those pounds of honey & pollen for the hive to survive the winter, so the cost seems to be very much worth it. I’m aware of two feral honey bee hives in Brooklyn now. I hope they make it through the winter, whenever it actually comes.
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Don’t forget, you can bid on my services as a natural history tour guide in Prospect Park as part of a fund-raiser for the The Nation. It’s personally guaranteed to be an amazing outing — winter, spring, summer, or fall.

Happy Thanksgiving!