On Sunday last they were going around in the kitchen swatting wasps. Small, slim ones, they seemed to be, but as one of the family is very susceptible to wasp stings, they had to be dealt with. The nest site was guessed at, but no one wanted to deal with it that day. Unlike, one of the party remembered, a letter in The Field from Brigadier E. E. Nott-Bower who wrote of lassoing wasps to find their source. He was informed by a much-travelled lady that you capture one under a tumbler from those buzzing around the jam on the tea-table, then take a piece of cotton, to one end of which is tied a fragment of tissue paper. On the other end a loop is made and carefully you lasso the wasp and watch the tissue paper, and follow the insect to its lair.
After several failures by the ladies, the Brigadier took matters in hand. He got a wasp of his own, lassoed it. "I rushed outside making hunting noises and when all were assembled, I released my wasp. But it refused to take to the air and merely lay on its back, kicking and stinging the cotton. I should have liked to take off the cotton and let it go, in acknowledgement of the thrill it had given me, but his would have been altogether too hazardous, and I was forced to kill it." He eventually traced the nest over the herbaceous border, over a thick laurel hedge, down a six foot drop and then across a boggy patch and up a nearly vertical bank covered with brambles. He though maybe he had had his leg pulled, but then says he has heard that something of the kind was practised in Australia. "But even there I should prefer to be mounted for the pursuit."
Obviously we, the readers, were having our legs pulled rather than he. Nevertheless two, more or less serious letters were published in subsequent issues of The Field on the same topic. Use red cotton only, and a very short length, advised one. Another related how the wasp merely flew to his mulberry tree on the lawn, bit through the cotton and presumably enjoyed the mulberries. No such activities last Sunday, just swipe, swipe with the fly-swat. The family knew where the nest was, but decided to postpone action.
Y
(From Harvesting The Field, 1991, by James Irvine Robertson, Pelham Books).