In blackened yellow flash a solitary wasp works long into the encroaching dusk. Her fevered searching reveals nothing on this grey evening and I empathise from a safe distance. I can sense her resolve that tonight is fraying under a damp August evening as nothing remotely, edibly insectoid stirs under the leaves of the bay tree, or the arching fronds of the tree fern. I try to place myself into her sentience, but it is hard. Yet I never doubt that she is driven to find food to take back to a waiting queen anxious for the state of her nation. A nation encapsulated within a labyrinth of papery cocoons. Every chamber a royal dynasty waiting for the founding breath of spring. I imagine a low murmur seeps through the nest as yet another worker returns empty-handed from the field. How does this worker bear the burden of all this succession without any seeming gain? That all revolves around her and if she fails all is lost and her line dies forever. She does not think as you or I but there is a pattern within her and somewhere there is regret. Yet she never gives up hope and just as she will fail her task and return to taste the last larval milk a caterpillar stirs and she is victorious. Tonight they will cap the last chamber and all the food supplied form the larvae will be gone. All activity shall still and the precious galleries of hard borne and tended brood will demand that she must defend a royal nursery and when the task is done slowly decay into the autumn. But if she can stay alive just a little while longer then one sunny autumn evening she will see her defining moment as a stream of fertile sisters take to the air and rise on a sunbeam to dissipate on the wind. Then she shall fall to the ground beside her gracious queen-mother-sister and leave the world blessed and special from the love only the truly selfless are given. Just a s I have been given it by all the wonderful and special peoples around me who have loved me no matter what the cost was. They deserve nothing less that an eternity of bliss.