The social wasps swarm in September
searching out sugar, discarded sodas,
following a woman's fruity perfume;
they are careless in their hunger,
falling into paint cans, entering cars,
driven to consume, to sip and sample,
and often, hungry, angry, to sting.
The queens have already flown and mated
and abandoned the colonies that raised them.
The queens have found shelter
and will survive the winter,
the long nights without food,
the freeze that kills
every worker, every wasp, every yellow jacket
in every nest. Only the queens survive.
The social wasps are very much like bees,
colonial, matriarchal, single-minded, venomous,
like irritable makeshift wild bees, forced out
to build honeycombs out of scrap wax and sawdust
or the victims of the robber bees, come home
to find the hive overturned, drones slaughtered,
and the scent of the queen just fading
as if traced in paraffin and burning away.
Sweet bees trade honey for safety,
live domesticated in boxy pastures.
But wasps make no concessions.
Hornets, ferocious, hostile, bear no insults
but return each provocation with brutal assault;
mud-daubers are solitary but fierce, deceptively
slender, precise and cool inside adobe walls.
The yellow jackets seem benign in comparison,
awkwardly climbing inside grapefruit rinds, watching
beside hummingbird feeders for the last drop of syrup,
or trailing wistfully behind a child carrying candy.
Only two or three will appear on the screendoor
never the great swarms that smother their victims,
stinging behind the eye, inside the throat, settling
like a blanket on unfortunate postmen, pursuing
the ambulance as it speeds away, a patient swelling
with serum, breathing on a ventilator, in shock
or cardiac arrest, already dead, still screaming.
Their territory is the trailer, the trashcan, the drive-thru window,
they hunt in small groups, buzzing like flies, in complete disorder.
You can laugh at a yellow jacket and brush it off your sleeve.
But think how implacable a destiny. Each autumn, apocalypse.
The entire colony, save one, annihilated.
What dreams that queen must have, all winter,
bloated on the sweet lives of a thousand thousand sisters.
She sleeps curled in her refuge, fertile, well fed
resting from the arduous mating flight, groomed by
the workers whose bodies now drift like dried leaves
from the place where the cold night took them.
How can she bear the months of isolation?
Her dreams recount a population sacrificed
for the continuity of her kind. The wings beating
inside her head must drive her mad.
When she wakes, alone, near starved,
the world of yellow jackets will start over.
The new colony will be ruled by her scent,
her dispensation, her sharp covenant;
young queens, all but one, will be
stung to death before they can hatch.
The new queen will be tended by her infertile sisters;
she will be fed with the history of her waspish race
and grow large on tales of disaster, of plague and fire,
a generation dropping suddenly from the sky, frozen
and lost forever. She will understand her mission
to be the preservation of a culture already frantic
with the nearness of the last days, gorging
on the last sugar they will ever taste, such sweetness
in the face of catastrophe that any yellow jacket
will fling itself into certain death for just a mouthful,
a grain of sugar to take back to the nest,
sugar for the queen, for all her sisters,
a morsel of sweet life, of a future, anything at all.
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