Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/191

Rh at some of the peculiar blossoms which appeal rather to the senses and sensibilities of other and more original insect guests.

The wasp, though undoubtedly an irascible and ill-balanced creature, and a chauvinist of the fiercest description, is yet a person of far more width of mind and far wider range of experience in his own way than the borné and conventional bee. His taste, in fact (like the taste of that hypothetical person, the general reader), is quite omnivorous: while he does not refuse meat, he has an excellent judgment in the sunny side of peaches, and he can make a meal at a pinch off the honey in more than one kind of wasp-specialized flower. But the peculiar likes and dislikes of wasps have produced a curious effect upon the shape and hue of the blossoms which owe their traits to these greedy and not very aesthetic insects. Your bee has a long proboscis and a keen sense of color; so the flowers that lay themselves out on his behalf store their honey at the end of a long tube, and rejoice in brilliant blue or crimson or purple petals. Your wasp, on the other hand, in his matter-of-fact Philistine fashion, cares for none of these things: he asks only plenty of honey, and no foolish obstructions in the way of getting it. Accordingly, wasp-flowers are remarkable for having a helmet-shaped tube, exactly fitted to a wasp's head, with abundant honey filling the bottom of the bell, while in color they are generally a peculiar livid reddish brown, more or less suggestive of a butcher's shop.

We have two or three good typical wasp-flowers, wild or cultivated, in England, of which the snowberry of our shrubberies is probably the best known to the outside public, other than wasps. But the dingy fig-worts that grow by the water-side are far more noteworthy, because they have such extremely odd-looking, one-sided blossoms, made to measure by nature for the wasp's head. The minuteness with which plants adapt themselves to the merest tricks of habit in the insects to whom they are habitually at home is very well illustrated in this queer plant. Bees and butterflies, and all other regular flower-haunters, have a trick of beginning at the bottom of a spike of flowers (as in foxglove or sage), and working gradually upward; so in these cases the pollen-bags ripen first, while the sensitive surface of the seed-vessel doesn't mature till a later period. Thus, the bee, lighting first on the older and lower flowers, in their second stage, fertilizes them with the pollen he has brought from the last plant; while on the upper part of the spike he gathers more pollen, which he carries away to the next plant, and so insures the great desideratum of nature, a healthy cross. But the wasp, with his usual perversity of disposition, reverses all this: he begins at the top of the spike, and works gradually downward. To meet this abnormal fancy of the vespine intellect, the fig-wort makes its sensitive surface mature first, while its pollen-bags only shed their mealy dust a little later. So the wasp, lighting first on the newly opened blossoms at the top, comes in