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An Insect Community

An Insect Community image
Parent Issue
Day
29
Month
June
Year
1894
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

Wasps act as arehitects, builders, carpeuters and paper makers. They go abroad into the fields and gardens in search of provisions. With exemplary care for the public welfare they eat out the sunny side of your peaches and carry away meat f rom the lamb chops in your larder. Man, baso man, who robs the busy bee of its hard earned honey and slays the gentle calf for the production of veal cutlets, usually speaks of the socialist insects as robbers and depredators. But he forgets that the geuerous and public spirited wasp does not levy tribute on his apricots for itself alone. It is the commissary of the republic. Each worker humes back to the nest the results of his fruit hunting or his marauding expeditions and shares them aniong his fellow subject with that distributive jnstice which Aristotle preached aud which nobody in our human communities practices. He carries out the winciples of the Fabián society. Every snccessful wasp, when he reinrns to the nest with a piece of primo jeef, or a wingless fly, or a cargo of BUgar saved for the community from the grocer's barrel, perches ou the top of the dome among his assembled fellows, and disgorging all his spoils divides them equally among nurses and paper makers. His two main doctrines are, 'If any wasp will not work, neither shall he eat, ' ' and "Every wasp to labor according to his capacity and receive aocording to his needs in a free confmunity. " División of labor, I believe, goes a long way in the nest. Sorne of the work■i to bespecially.employed as for3 and soldiers, others appear to be f as nursos and guardians, while yet others are engaged as paper makers ind masona I; is even said that these last work by clefinite sliifts, 1 1-ruow not on what authority, raid that they each lave a space of about a squrire kich allotted to them to fill v.'ith cells, 0:1 which 110 neighboring worker is permitted to encroach with imp-onity. Bat tl;ese are perhaps the fictions of imaginative observers. At rato, the eight honrs' act isnotyetini peral 1 ::. Wasps work early aud late of their own mere notion. -

Article

Subjects
Ann Arbor Argus
Old News