This elegantly illustrated book explains stage by stage in easy text how a wasp nest is built. It follows by days and weeks and shows how the queen's industrious workers create a sturdy, weatherproof home. Readers see the inside of the growing nest where the eggs turn into larvae and emerge 20 days later as juveniles. As the nest gets bigger and the story progresses, the book's pages become bigger too. Cross sections show the amazing construction...

"When wasps come to Steve in a dream offering to fix his sick baby brother, he thinks all he has to do is say yes. But yes may not mean what Steve thinks it means."--

While making a mud house for her hornet egg, a wasp follows a human child throughout his day as he works in a Brazilian charcoal mine.

Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second to Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden. For centuries, WASPs like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Friend noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics....

In this eye-opening and entertaining work of popular science in the spirit of The Mosquito, Entangled Life, and The Book of Eels, a leading behavioral ecologist transforms our understanding of wasps, exploring these much-maligned insects' secret world, their incredible diversity and complex social lives, and revealing how they hold our fragile ecosystem in balance. Wasps get a bad rap, but there may no other earthly creature guarding so many undiscovered...