Hornets suffer from a bad press . . . their reputation unfairly prejudicing their chances of a quiet life.
It was a lovely sunny morning to be mooching around in the farmyard, just idling away a few moments watching cattle scrummaging around and drinking from the troughs. On the surrounding roofs families of starlings and sparrows and were in hot territorial disputes – so the air was far from quiet. I strolled across to the pump-house – an ugly brick shack surrounding the farm’s bore-hole and which we have screened off with cotoneaster bushes. From those bushes came the industrial buzzing of hard-working insects and I spotted several dozen of our neighbour’s bees. These are a docile Italian type of honey bee and they always visit us at this time of year; the pale pink barely-opened cotoneaster blossoms make a tasty aperitif for the workers until their main course, the field beans, come into flower.
Reaching into the shack, I turned on the electric pump and became aware that in the bushes surrounding the door, the humming noise had increased to a loud vibrant buzz. Looking at the downward sweeping branches, I soon found the source of all the noise – large hornets were working conscientiously from flower to flower. The brown and orange markings of this largest of British wasps Vespa crabro are much mellower than the strident black and yellow hues of the common wasp. I stood to one side to watch and have to say – a more industrious and hard-working group of animals never visited the farm. They hornets foraged intently among the fragrant florets, then every few seconds one became air-borne and was replaced by a sister (bees and wasps belonging to definitely feminist communities!) In vain I tried to follow their line of flight, but once airborne each was lost in the hazy blue sky. They flew at great speed, unlike our resident bumble bees which are easily followed as they bumble along to nests in the tufts of grass in a nearby meadow.
A couple of days later we discovered the hornet’s nest – but only by chance. Old brown bales, left over from last season’s crop, still remained stacked in an untidy pile in the French barn. They were being thrown down and forked out to make a foundation for the coming year’s hay crop. Two bales tumbled from the heap and there, between them, was a grey-brown oval shaped nest barely 12 cm across. Bouncing onto the hay below, it lay apparently undamaged. The shell felt like soft cardboard; hornets chew wood to a soft paste like papier-mâché before mixing it with soil to fashion their nests. This one felt very light when I picked it up. It was completely enclosed, except for one hole about 1.5 cm wide leading into the chamber. I was peering inside when all doubts about the nest’s ownership was ended – two hornets landed on my shoulder in some confusion and began crawling down my arm. I’m sure a bee or wasp in similar circumstances would have stung me first, and asked questions later! But these hornets continued their quiet progress towards my hand before, apparently, having second thoughts and disappearing skyward.
If they were to find their brood again, we needed to position the nest as before. Not possible. The whole pile of bales now lay on the ground. No-one seemed too keen on the idea of unloading the new hay in the flight-path of a hornets nest – that bad reputation again. So, as we could not find it’s original resting place we compromised by wedging the nest between two girders in the roof, as directly vertical above the original spot as possible.
Sadly, I have to report that raising the nest 3m proved a step too far for the hornets – they never settled down and soon after – abandoned their home.