Hornets

Overview

Hornets are the largest of the stinging wasps, and in late summer the worst trouble of an orchard. A nest in the hollow of an old fruit tree or under the eaves of a store-house can hold hundreds, and a picker who sets a ladder against the wrong tree is off it again in a breath. In the Leeward Folds the orchard leagues that share pickers and presses share the hornet work too, and burn the nests at night.

Appearance

A hornet is as long as the top joint of a thumb: a heavy, red-brown head and chest, a belly banded in dark brown and deep yellow, and amber wings that fold flat along the back. In flight it is slower and louder than a wasp, with a low drone that a picker learns to hear over the wind. The nest is a papery ball the size of a head or larger, made of chewed wood, layered in shell-like bands of buff and brown, with one opening at the bottom. A disturbed nest gives off a sour, sharp smell that brings the rest out.

Habitat and Range

They nest in hollow trees, in the eaves and wall gaps of barns and drying sheds, and in the stone of old terrace walls, wherever there is shelter and fruit or insects to hunt. They are commonest in the orchards and terraces of the Folds, in the villages and hedgerows of the Confluence Basins, and at the warmer edges of the Elderweald. They fly by night as well as by day, and come to lamps.

Behaviour and Temperament

Hornets hunt flies, bees, and other insects to feed their grubs, and in late summer turn to ripe and fallen fruit, hollowing a pear from the inside. A single hornet at the fruit ignores a picker who moves slowly. A nest does not: anyone who knocks it, shakes its branch, or stands at its mouth is stung again and again, and the hornets follow for a long way. They are worst when the nest is largest, just as the fruit comes in.

Abilities

A hornet stings repeatedly without losing its sting. One sting is a deep, throbbing pain and a swelling for a day; a dozen sicken a grown Human, and fewer a small body (see Stings and Bites).

Life Cycle

A single queen wakes in spring from the rotten wood where she wintered and builds a small nest the size of a walnut. Her first workers enlarge it all summer. In autumn the nest raises new queens and drones; with the first frosts the workers and the old queen die, the new queens go to ground, and the nest is never used again.

Uses and Dangers

They kill many orchard pests, and a few fold keepers leave a distant nest alone for that reason. Their cost is fruit and stings, and now and then a picker's fall from a ladder. Fold orchard leagues find the nests by day, mark them, and go out after dark with smoke-pots and long poles wrapped in burning rag, when every hornet is home and slow with cold; the burnt nest is knocked into a sack and the sack into water. A Halfling child is not let onto a picking ladder until it can tell a hornet's drone from a bee's.

Lore and Belief

Halflings say a hornet nest under the eaves means too much is being kept that should have been shared. Basin folk hold that seven hornet stings kill a horse and three a man, which overstates it. Some believe the queen that survives the winter is the same one every year, and there is a children's rhyme for her.

Halfling tales tell of the fold that drove off a band of thieves by throwing a hornet nest over the wall into their camp, and children in the Folds still play at it with pine cones.

Where It Appears

• Stings and Bites