“BLACK AND WHITE, jackdaw and gull, mingled in strange partnership, seeking some sort of liberation, never satisfied, never still. Flocks of starlings, rustling like silk, flew to fresh pasture, driven by the same necessity of movement, and the smaller birds, the finches and the larks, scattered from tree to hedge as if compelled.”
These are the words of Daphne du Maurier, from the long short story “The Birds,” a story that entered Alfred Hitchcock’s dreams. An infinitude nightmare of birds is like an infinitude nightmare of yellow jackets.
***
But before it all went full Daphne du Maurier, it was just one single yellow jacket queen. Dolichovespula arenaria. Of the aerial nest kind.
I planted the giant elephant ear bulb not far from her new home and was not bothered. I pulled weeds from between the hosta plants and the nandina directly below, and it was spring, and we each had parts to play. Me, queen of my garden. She, queen of her soon-to-be realm.
I dreamed of summer. I dreamed of making paper on the deck beside the blooming hosta and the leafy nandina. A vat of plant pulp on the glass deck table. My worn-out couch sheets in a pile. My deckle and mold in hand. My blanched garden flowers on the ready. My portable drying rack that reminds me of my mother. I’d give anything to see my mother again.
There would be sun and skies and breeze and shade. There would be summer. There would be handmade paper.
***
The first yellow jacket queen is the foundress. She (to begin) does it all. She decides where the kingdom will be—inside which hidden cove, behind which sheltered eave, within which crack behind which electrical meter above which hosta garden—and she must hurry; she is pregnant. The first brood cells are hers to build. The first workers are hers to birth and sustain (with proteins snatched and swished from live bugs or various dead things). The eggs becoming larvae. The larvae becoming pupae. The pupae becoming adults.
Which is to say the eventual multitudes of the foundress realm.
The journey from egg to employee takes thirty low-thrum days.
Theoretically.
***
I took care, did not intervene. The queen was busy and so was I. She among her ever more populous cells in the secret place behind the meter. Me on the deck beside the hostas. The deck, if not fancy, is still the place I like best in the country of my home. The nearby Japanese maple thrusts its arms above my head. The long floor planks are made of old softwood. There’s a crisscross of lights in the branches—fairy lamps that glow at night and bauble necklace-like during the day.
***
You could say that paper is a mash of loosened cellulose fibers woven together with hydrogen bonds. That paper carries memories, and dreams. That there’d be nothing, without paper.
I was aware of the traffic thrum by the meter—the obedient multitudes that left and returned, left and returned the realm the foundress. The yellow jackets shot out into the day like golden ammunition and blazed back home with no less speed or volume.
Buzzed.
Hovered.
Miles, they’d gone.
While there, on the adjacent deck I stood, making my paper. Smelly grassy paper. Typographical recycled paper. Aster-garnished paper.
It was my summer, too. They were only yellow jackets.
***
The cells of every yellow jacket nest are built of yellow jacket paper. The protective wall that surrounds the community of cells is built of yellow jacket paper, too—old wood fibers that have been stripped and chewed and truly masticated, which is to say, pulped. You could say that, hundreds of millions of years ago, yellow jackets (and the paper wasps) invented paper. You could say that paper is a mash of loosened cellulose fibers woven together with hydrogen bonds. That paper carries memories, and dreams. That there’d be nothing, without paper.
***
Each sterile female yellow jacket has her job to do. She is to hunt down spiders, flies, fleshy bugs, that unattended hamburger patty on the grill, and to share her protein harvest with the propagating larvae. She is to go to war, when there must be war, when any part of the realm, life cycle, food supply is threatened. She is armored. She can sting. She can sting repeatedly. If you are allergic, she will kill you.
***
Read more about Beth’s adventures in paper-making in her new book.
“Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where? And to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them, and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.”
***
For autumn was coming. Or, at least, it was now the end of August. The constant thrum was thrumming. The breadth of sky the yellow jackets consumed was growing wider, higher, wilder, as now the hunt was on for fatty sugars to feed other queens inside the realm. The ones that would leave in time to find their overwintering spot—the hollow of a tree, unraked pile of leaf litter—so that they, in the aftermath of snow or ice or bitter winds, might each emerge as their own foundress.
***
There were yellow jackets in the laundry room. There were yellow jackets in the kitchen. There were yellow jackets swarming the trash cans outside and concerning the neighbors and preventing the tree surgeon from caring for the Japanese maple limbs that had grown too long over the deck.
I abandoned papermaking.
I hid inside my house.
***
My husband traveled away for a short time. It was me and the yellow jackets and the thrum. When my husband returned, I said something must be done. That thousands of yellow jackets were living now behind the meter, thousands and thousands of them. That soon there’d be thousands more. That yellow jackets once built a nest as big as a Volkswagen bug. In that case, I said, there must have been tens of thousands, and sure, I didn’t really know the precise number of yellow jackets behind the meter, but surely it was thousands? This could get very bad, I said, and besides, wasn’t I allergic? Or shouldn’t I—theoretically speaking—be, given that I am allergic to nearly every insect swipe and pierce and blood suck?
***
My husband is ingenious. My husband laid a trap. My husband came inside with yellow jackets on his shirt, and I found a stick, and I knocked them off, but my husband had been stung. I found the Cortaid. I played nurse. He waited, and I cowered.
***
The yellow jackets were all their thousands now, all at the same time, in the near sky. Fleeing the nest, defending the nest, buzzing the nest, turning back toward the house and slamming their pretty jacketed selves against the window in the kitchen by the meter. Like hail.
The yellow jackets were irate. The yellow jackets were all their thousands now, all at the same time, in the near sky. Fleeing the nest, defending the nest, buzzing the nest, turning back toward the house and slamming their pretty jacketed selves against the window in the kitchen by the meter. Like hail. They sounded like hail slamming and slamming the window glass, and more yellow jackets showed up, inside the house, and they looked at me, and I looked at them, and we were enemies now.
***
We’d been papermakers, side by side, proud and perhaps a bit puffed up about the quality of our craft. Grass paper, alphabetical paper, aster-infused paper, ream paper. Until it had all gone bad.
***
“But with each dive, with each attack, they became bolder. And they had no thought for themselves. When they dived low and missed, they crashed, bruised and broken, on the ground.”
***
I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear the thought of the foundress and her realm, the paper cells she and her multitudes had built, the paper wall, the new queens that had been getting fat, the few males that had done their job so that the species could live on. I couldn’t bear that when my husband went out on the deck, another well-armed, irate yellow jacket aimed and stung.
***
We had a heat wave. The hostas burned. The nandina curled. The giant leaves of the elephant ear yellowed. I watched from within my fortress, helpless. I could not leave the house to water them. There was nothing to be done. But watch. But wait. But hunker down.
***
“The boards were strong against the windows and on the chimneys too. The cottage was filled with stores, with fuel, with all they needed for the next few days.”
***
Most female yellow jackets live the whole summer through September. Some die, the natural way of things, within weeks. If you wait until winter comes, the hive will empty on its own.
But the hive behind the meter above the garden by the deck did not empty on its own. Day after day, the skies beyond grew quieter. Day after day I saw less swarm. Those that survived flew, crawled, staggered to my kitchen. They climbed my pale yellow walls. They perched on my white gloss sills. They dared me to feel, again, at home, to remember, again, my mother, years ago—outside in the breeze, outside in the peace, hanging fresh shirts by the garden.