The fennel plants at our front stoop are a glory and a problem. The tallest of them is an entomological aircraft carrier, its yellow umbels hovered over by menacing insects, mostly wasps—yellow jackets, paper wasps, potter’s wasps, huge and frightening Great Black Wasps, tiny enameled sweat bees and flower flies of every color and pattern, gray leafcutters, mimics—wasps, that is, which look like bees but aren’t— honeybees, bumblebees, small portly bees which might be bumblebees but aren’t, a wasp with a bright orange posterior—sometimes seven or eight species in the air at the same time, circling.
Fennel is pollinated occasionally by honeybees but mostly by wasps. Until we planted fennel, I hadn’t thought much about wasps. I didn’t know there were so many kinds of them. It never occurred to me that they pollinated flowers. But I like anything that flies, and thus most insects, even the dangerous ones. So I like these wasps.
Not everyone does. Not everyone is brave enough to pay us a summer visit. One year the wasps in the fennel were joined by mud daubers, harmless creatures but equally fierce in appearance, who hung a beautiful and elaborate nest from the light fixture above the front door. I was exhilarated—all those glorious wasps!
What to do about them? Anything? I know people who say, in mere annoyance or real distress, “I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to be here.” I didn’t ask to be here either, but fearful, unready as I am, I can’t help feeling a certain excitement. What to make of these menacing, beautiful, unaccountable creatures, ushered in such variety and numbers into my garden? The point, surely, is that it isn’t my world, and for good or ill, not my idea.
I wasn’t asked.
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