Economic entomology for the farmer and fruit-grower : and for use as a text-book in agricultural schools and colleges . y have a fondness forchewing into raw meat and lapping the blood. They feed theirlarvae honey and other plant juices, and also the masticated frag-ments of insects. That is to say, they prepare the animal foodby first chewing into a pulp before feeding it. Two types of these wasps are common throughout the UnitedStates,—the first rather slender, with a spindle-shaped abdomen,and usually a more or less red-brown color, often marked withyellow. These belong to the genus Polistc
Economic entomology for the farmer and fruit-grower : and for use as a text-book in agricultural schools and colleges . y have a fondness forchewing into raw meat and lapping the blood. They feed theirlarvae honey and other plant juices, and also the masticated frag-ments of insects. That is to say, they prepare the animal foodby first chewing into a pulp before feeding it. Two types of these wasps are common throughout the UnitedStates,—the first rather slender, with a spindle-shaped abdomen,and usually a more or less red-brown color, often marked withyellow. These belong to the genus Polistcs, and they build theirpaper combs openly, —that is, without any covering, and ^^us-pended by a single, short, central stalk. The colonies rarelybecome very large, but they are very numerous in most parts ofthe country. The true wasps, or members of the genus Vespa, have theabdomen cylindrical, squarely cut off where it joins the thorax,and are very often contrastingly marked with white or yellow,occasionally with red or brown on a black ground. These arethe hornets and yellow-jackets, and their colonies some-. THE IXSECT II ORLD. 407 times become of eintrmous size, many hundreds of individualsbeing found in a single nest in the latter part of the is not looked for by the insects, and the winter stormsand snows disintegrate the paper structures, so that in spring itis rarely possible to find them, however abundant they may havebeen during the summer pre\ious. Wasps are beneficial, as a whole, since they feed largely uponother insects and never directly upon crops. They are a nui- FiG. 463.
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectinsectp, bookyear1906
