A Book of Nimble Beasts

We all know what butter is, and we know, too, that there are quite a number of English words which begin with "butter." It is not a pretty beginning, is it? But there it is. Let us think of a few—butter-fly, butter-cup, butter-wort, butter-fingers, butter-scotch—why, one can think of half a dozen straight away.

Now this shows us clearly that "butter" is a very old word, and that the people of long ago (who were much less clever than we are, perhaps) must have used it quite naturally when they wanted to describe anything which was squashy, or pasty, or greasy, or slippery, or yellow.

The Brimstone Butterfly

After whom all "Butterflies" are probably called

Look at the picture at the top of the next page. I wish I could have given it to you in its proper colours. It looks much nicer like that. Look at it carefully. No other English butterfly has the same pretty curves to its wings, and some of you, I dare say, will know what it is by its shape. But I must tell those who do not know. It is a Brimstone Butterfly, and its colour is bright, bright yellow with an orange spot in the middle of each wing (you can only see one wing in the picture, the other three are hidden behind it; one way to tell a butterfly from a moth is to remember that butterflies' wings close standing up, but nearly all moths' wings close down flat).

It is almost certain that this insect was the first insect to be called "Butter"-fly because of its butter colour. When people began to see that there were other pretty flying things of much the same shape, though of quite different colours, they called them all Butterflies after this first one.

The Red Admiral

A Butterfly of many beautiful colours

So we speak, nowadays, without ever thinking of how funny it really is, of blue butterflies and white butterflies and black butterflies and purple butterflies, and red and yellow and green butterflies—all the colours of the rainbow, in fact.

The Purple Emperor

The most gorgeous Butterfly in England, though not by any means the most beautiful

We would hardly talk of black butter or purple butter, would we?

Some of you will perhaps wonder why the Brimstone Butterfly was the first to be noticed when there are so many others which are just as common.

I think I can tell you.

The Clifden Blue

The Brimstone is almost always the first butterfly to be seen in the spring. Most butterflies die towards the autumn, and leave eggs behind, which hatch out in the following year, but the Brimstone, and a few others, sleep through the cold winter months and come out in the first warm days of spring and then lay their eggs. The Brimstone comes out first of all, often quite early in February, and so he is the first butterfly that is likely to be noticed in the year.

Perhaps his coming out at a time when cows began to give more milk, and butter began to be more plentiful, had something to do with his being called "butterfly," but I think that his colour had more to do with it.

The Swallow-Tail Butterfly

Almost a paint-box in itself. It will give you blue, red, black and yellow. It is only found in the Cambridgeshire Fens

What lovely colours butterflies are! Have you ever fancied a butterfly paint-box? Let us think of a few common colours, and see how we could fill it. Suppose we wanted a blue? Why we should have a whole family of butterflies "The Blues" to choose from, and we should be just as well off for blacks and browns. For red we could take the beautiful scarlet ribbon of the Red Admiral. "Why is he called Admiral?" you ask. Well, Admiral is the same as Admirable, and his old name was Red Admirable. For purple we should have the Purple Emperor and the Purple Hair-streak—there is no purple quite so glorious as the purple that these have on their wings. For orange, the Orange-tip and the Clouded Yellow. For yellow, the Brimstone and several others. For white, of course, the Whites. Green might bother us a little, but there is one English butterfly, the Green Hair-streak, whose wings are a beautiful green underneath. As he is our only green butterfly I give you his picture. He is the upper butterfly in the first picture and, as you see, quite a little one.

The Black Pepper Moth

Probably quite the blackest Moth we have. They vary very much in colouring though

We must not forget gold and silver. When I was young, I expected to find gold and silver in a really nice paint-box, and I do not suppose young people have changed much since then. Silver we should have no trouble about. There is a big family of butterflies called the Fritillaries, who have wonderful patches and ribbons of silver on their wings. I do not think you will find gold, except perhaps a little gold powder, on any English butterfly, but you will find it on several chrysalises. Indeed, Chrysalis means "the little golden one," and the name was given to these queer spiky things because gold patches were so often seen on them.

The Silver Washed Fritillary

The silver is in broad bands on the under wings

I have seen little pictures made with the scales of butterflies' wings, with blue skies and green trees and everything. So you see a butterfly paint-box is not altogether a make-believe, though it is not an easy paint-box for young people to paint with.

TWO WONDERFUL WASPS

(JUNE)

This is one of Spinipes' burrows opened up. There is an egg at the bottom on the left-hand side and a caterpillar on the right-hand side. The egg is hanging by a silk thread, but you can't see this

I EXPECT you all must know the Common Yellow Wasps—the kind that come buzzing into the jam at tea-time; and I want to tell you this about them—that I don't think they ever really get angry if there is jam about and you leave them alone, though, when small people jump up and scream, and edge away from the table, and make bad shots at them with spoons, they get so frightened and bewildered, poor things, that they may sting somebody, because they feel they really must do something exciting.

Perhaps some of you do not know that there are seven different kinds of these Yellow Wasps to be met with in this country of ours, and I should be surprised to hear that any of you know much about the two Black Wasps whose story I am going to tell you. I say "black," because they look black, though both of them have yellow girdles on their bodies. I wish they had English names; for I am sure they both deserve them; and English names are much easier to remember than Latin ones. However, Latin names are the only ones I know for them, so we must make the best of it, and call one of them Spinipes (you must read this as if it were Spiny Peas) and the other Crabro.

This is a little picture of Spinipes bringing up a grub, which she is clasping beneath her body

We will take Spinipes first.

If you look at the picture on the opposite page, you will see what she is like, and, if you look at the picture in Spinipes the Sand-Wasp (p. 151) you will see one of the clever things she does.

She is building a little tube out of sand which is so delicate that the slightest touch from one of our own clumsy fingers will knock it down like a card-house, but it is strong enough for her to crawl inside; and she has to crawl inside very often, as you will see. I expect you will all want to know how she builds it, and what it is for. I will tell you how she builds it to begin with. You must know first that she has a pair of jaws which work quite differently from ours. Instead of moving up and down, they move across each other from side to side just like a pair of scissors.

This is the Spinipes' grub feeding on the little green caterpillars

The first thing that Spinipes does is to work this little pair of scissors in the sand so as to make a little hole. I am showing you on page 148 a picture of her when she is just starting to dig. Every little pellet of sand she digs out she puts carefully round the outside of the hole, and presently she glues them all together. She carries the glue somewhere inside her, and brings it out when she wants it, Then she digs a little deeper and glues another layer of sand pellets on the top of the first one, and in a very short time she has dug a hole about two inches deep, and built a little tube round the top of it, which is made of the little sand-pellets she has brought out of the hole. Sometimes the tube stands straight up, but more often it bends about half-way and curves downwards. When she has finished it off, and is sure that the hole is deep enough, and the tube is long enough, she goes right down to the bottom and lays an egg, and she hangs the egg by a tiny thread (which she also makes herself, but I don't know how she does it) to the side of the hole a little above the bottom. You will be able to see this in the picture, but you must remember that in this and in some of the other pictures the sand has been cut away so that you can see exactly how the hole goes. Then, if it is a bright, sunny day, as it usually is when she begins digging, she flies away, and in about half an hour's time comes back carrying something clasped tight against her body. What do you think that is? It is a small green caterpillar. She stops a moment at the entrance of the tube, pushes the caterpillar down in front of her, and disappears after it. In a few seconds she is out again and off, and in another quarter of an hour or so she is back again with another caterpillar and so on, without ever tiring, through six or seven hours of a hot June or July day.

This shows you the cocoon which Spinipes' grub makes for itself. I have opened it to show you the grub, and also the little partition in the shaft above the grub, which is the last thing Spinipes herself makes

I expect you will have guessed what the caterpillars are for. They are food for the wasp grub when it hatches out of the egg. Generally each hole has between twenty and thirty little caterpillars in it, and sometimes, when caterpillars are scarce, the Mother Wasp has to work hard for three or four days. If you dig into a hole yourself and look at the store of little caterpillars, you will see there is something the matter with them. They seem to be alive and yet they don't seem to be able to crawl. Wise men say that the wasp stings them just enough to make them drowsy so that they can't crawl out of the hole, and can't hurt the wasp grub by jostling up against it. It wouldn't do to kill them, because then they would go bad in the hole before the grub had time to eat them. This sounds rather cruel, but I don't think it is really, because it is quite certain that the caterpillars cannot feel as we should perhaps feel, and we may be quite sure that in the wonderful Nature World everything is arranged for the best, so that only the right number of wasp-grubs may be properly fed and grow up to do what it is their duty to do, and only the right number of small green caterpillars may grow up also.

The little beetle that the caterpillars turn into. It is sitting on its own open-work cocoon, from which it has just hatched out. The picture makes it about twice its real size

You will wonder, I expect, why the Mother Wasp troubles to make the little tube above the hole. I think I can tell you one reason and you must remember this, because it was just by chance that I found it out. One hot morning in June I watched Mother Spinipes bringing seven caterpillars to her hole. Then a heavy thunderstorm came on, and the rain came down in buckets, and I had to run away for shelter. Late in the evening when it had cleared up a little, I thought I would like to see what had happened to the tube I had been watching, and I went back to the place and found that the rain had knocked it all to pieces. But I saw something much more interesting than this. The tube had been on the face of a sand-cliff, and in a crack close by there was an ants' nest. I found that the ants were running down the wasp's hole and bringing out the caterpillars as fast as they could (I saw them take six away), and taking them along the face of the cliff into their own stronghold. Now the tube that stands out from the sand somehow frightens the ants (I never saw an ant climb out along the tube and down inside it), and so I think that one of the reasons for the tube must be that it keeps away ants and creatures of that kind who crawl about on the face of the sand cliff and like eating caterpillars.

BEFORE THE THUNDERSTORM

AFTER THE THUNDERSTORM

This is a large picture of Crabro, about twice as big as she really is

It was a long time before I found out what kind of creature the caterpillars stored by Spinipes would have turned into if they had not been caught. I thought that it would have been a small moth, but I was quite wrong. At different times I took several caterpillars away from the tubes, and tried to bring them up, but it was of no use, for they all died because they could not eat. One day, however, I happened to be sweeping with a butterfly-net in a field of lucerne—it is great fun sweeping, and you should try it, for you never know what you may get next—and I swept up what I knew at once was the self-same little green caterpillar that Spinipes stocked her larder with. She always brought the same kind. Well, I got a good many of them by sweeping in the lucerne, and brought them up carefully, and, in due time, they spun little open-work cocoons on the lucerne leaves which I fed them with, and at last turned into small, brown, long-nosed beetles. I need not trouble you with the Latin names of these beetles, but I may tell you that they are a kind of weevil which is very common and very destructive to clover and plants of that kind. So, if we consider that every Mother Spinipes lays eight or nine eggs, and stocks eight or nine burrows each with about thirty destructive little caterpillars, we must allow that she is a very useful little wasp.

This is Crabro looking out of her hole. The front of her face is covered with bright silver hair, so fine that it looks like a silver plate. The picture is twice her real size

But I am not sure that she is more useful to man than the other little wasp I have to tell of, the Crabro. I found out her usefulness quite by chance, and I expect you will like to hear how. To begin with, I must tell you that all the "Digger" Wasps, as some people call them, Spinipes and the Crabros and several other kinds, store their burrows with insect food for their grubs to feed on.

But each one has her own particular idea as to what is the best food. One will use nothing but little spiders, another nothing but little flies, another, like Spinipes, nothing but little beetle grubs. And the queer part is that they seldom seem to make any mistake as to the kind of food they want. It will be one kind of spider, and one kind of fly, and one kind of beetle-grub. If there are ever more than one kind, they are always very near relations, and, I suppose, taste very much alike.

This is how the cocoon looked when I had taken the sawdust away. The plug of sawdust above it leads into the round hole in the wood

Now Crabro's store consists of really large flies, blue-bottles, and green-bottles—I expect most of you know the beautiful shiny green-bottle fly whose proper name is Caesar—and how little Crabro manages to overcome and carry off large bottle-flies who are several times her own size and several times her own weight, I cannot tell. But I have found out for certain that she does so, and the pictures will show you how I found out.