The air was heavy with the scent of mulberries, mud, and fermentation. I’d finished a small job in the town of Normal, Illinois: a college town, a rather boring expanse of campus buildings and shopping malls. Normal, it would seem, lives up to its name. It is…unspectacular. It is, for lack of a better term, normal. It is an eternity’s drive from Chicago: 3.5 hours, depending on traffic conditions, but interminably longer when you’re stuck in the cab of a truck with very little leg room. It rained, just before we’d made our delivery of an x-ray unit, a sterilizer, a compressor and a vacuum pump to a brand new dental office. It rained—in spurts—on our way back to the northern fringe of Illinois. We didn’t return to Chicago, immediately. My father needed to modify a piece of metal he’d been working on: some improvised attachment for one truck or another, and so I found myself in a suburb of Chicago, nearly intoxicated by the scent of fermenting mulberries, mud, and cloying humidity. As my father and a friend worked on metal—making sparks and singing the air, I ambled around the scrap-yard, looking for interesting things. I found pieces of rusted metal, surrounded by oceans of mud. I found dog-deposits, buzzing with flies. My head throbbed with the faint presence of an asymmetrical sinus headache. It could have been an unpleasant experience, but there were yellow jackets in the area, drawn to the siren-scent of fermenting rot. There were hives in the area, half a dozen, according to my improvised count, and so the presence of a fledgling headache was nothing compared to the prospect of seeing infant yellow jackets in their papery nests. It’s too early in the year for an impressive display of yellow jacket larvae, however. I’ve seen plenty of eggs lain in recycled nests, plenty of queens buzzing around sweet-scented things. What hives I’ve seen, so far, are tiny things—the insect-equivalent of gypsy caravans, not yet anchored to the banks of one fortuitous river or another. Most Queen-mothers—if they’ve even laid eggs yet—are locked in the need to forage and to scout out locations for new hives. As is common, many queens will simply move into nests left empty by last autumn’s die-off. Others will build new hives from scratch. I don’t know if the queen pictured here will keep the hive’s she’s discovered—she strikes me more as a builder than a recycler. The diminutive, half-rotted hive she’s found is situated on an iron fence bordering a rather busy sidewalk. She hasn’t laid eggs—at least not here—and though she’s done a few repairs, I don’t think that the fence in question will provide her with the room she’ll need once her hive gets going. Yellow jackets like shady, dark places for their nests: protected places not subject to the indignities of human pedestrian traffic or sunlight that overheats their papery domains, and so the young (or not so young) queen shown here, may move elsewhere. I was tempted to help her along, but refrained from doing so. Moving a stinging, wasp-queen in an orange-juice bottle with an air-hole drilled into the top might have caused more distress than is necessary. I’m quite sure that she wouldn’t have stung me. I’d coaxed her onto my finger (with orange juice) after all, but she would have become quite agitated within the confines of a small bottle emblazoned with the name and logo of MR. PURE. As I was in the presence of three full-grown human males (with a pronounced fear of insects dressed in the colors of police crime-scene tape) I decided to leave this pretty little queen where I'd found her. *** As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great week.