Potter Wasp, vespidae | Observed along a muddy road near Mweiga, Nyeri County, Kenya, Dec. 2015. | Courtesy of: www.ngkenya.com/inverts/
By Don Sterba
As a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya a few (OK, “many”) years ago, I taught physics at a rural secondary school and maintained a rear, prep area stocked with cabinets and shelves of paraphernalia for classroom demonstrations and laboratory assignments. Since the school was only about 8 miles north of the Equator, classrooms usually were open-air for natural ventilation.
Much of my time was devoted to class preparations, and one weekend afternoon, while poking around in the lab’s prep room, I was abruptly distracted by a wasp that buzzed near my head before landing upon a storage shelf where, wings flitting occasionally, it jerkily walked to the left, maneuvered around several small, shelved items and disappeared from view behind some larger items. After a short delay, it appeared in the air again and exited the prep room through an open, louvered window.
Several minutes later, this uninvited visitor reappeared and landed at the same spot where I saw it land earlier, and again it jerkily walked to the left around the same shelf items and disappeared from view. This time, after the wasp flew off, I slowly and carefully investigated the shelf and found a hidden mud nest that this wasp was constructing. As a young child, insects were my very first critters of interest (yes, even before birds), and I now wondered just how clever a wasp might be. After noting exactly where the wasp touched down on the shelf, I moved one of the small shelf items to a new location directly upon the middle of the wasp’s “walking path” to her unfinished nest. I then waited to see how she negotiated this new obstruction.
A few minutes later, this busy-as-a-bee wasp buzzed by once again, landed upon her usual spot on the shelf, started walking and was ... Stymied!! She felt the obstacle a few times with her antennae, walked around a bit, re-encountered the obstacle, walked around some more, then flew up and circled in the air before landing once more at her accustomed spot only to walk again into the same obstruction. And again she examined the obstruction, walked around a bit, then took off and re-landed at the same spot... with the same result as before. She never made an attempt to simply walk around the obstacle, a task that cats and dogs (but not chickens, I’ve heard) can easily solve.
According to some wags, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Obviously, this definition should not apply to lesser life forms with far, far fewer neurons than we humans. Given more time to investigate the situation, this wasp eventually may have been able to reprogram her route to the nest, but I grew weary of the game and wary of her stinger, shooed her outside and quickly closed the louvers, wishing her well in finding an alternative location for her nest.
I grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm of 133 acres where I first noticed interesting birds & bugs & a dark, Milky Way-blessed night sky. My rural primary school, a one-mile walk from home, was a one-room building with one teacher for all 8 grades. A few years later, grad school studies took me to California where I met my first birder mentors, Shum Suffel and Ralph Mancke. The Peace Corps sent me to Kenya to teach science & math (and a little English) — a perfect match for me & birding. Back in the US, I returned to CA and taught at private schools for a few years before working for an aerospace company until my retirement. I now play the low-carbon-footprint game by doing nearly all of my birding within a few miles of home. | email: DonSterba@gmail.com