Home Builders Extraordinary

A Gisborne man's hobby has kept him busy as a bee over the past few weeks, exterminating thousands of the local population.... of wasps, that is.

He is Trevor Capon, 42 Gordon Street, who is assisted in his work by John Green. Trevor has followed the habits of wasps since their introduction to New Zealand in the Waikato after the last war. This year, for the first time in his experience, wasps have taken to building their nests in the walls and ceilings of houses. This is attributed to ground conditions being wetter than normal.

We photographed Trevor at work in the roof of a house in Kaiti, where a particularly large nest was situated. He had previously fumigated it, killing its 50-60 thousand occupants. He then cut the nest from the building (above) and dissected it for our inspection.

So we humans think we are home-builders extraordinary, with our modern tenement projects and multi-storey blocks of flats. Compare our efforts with those of this colony of wasps.

In less than six months the colony, starting from a single Queen, built a miniature city with accommodation for some 60,000 population, complete with multi-storey living quarters, hatcheries and Royal Palace. In addition to this, the wasps manufactured their own building materials, a paper-like substance created from chewed wood. During this period, the Queen wasp has been far from idle, laying eggs to increase the population by up to 2000 per day. What drones we humans are, compared with these busy little fellows.