THE HYPNOTISM OF WASPS

When I used to live in Ghana, I had a wasps' nest somewhere near my house, perhaps even under the rafters, and, since I had left my radio in bed under the mosquito net, my breakfast time entertainment was to study their behaviour. I observed a strange ritual that I can't explain.

The noise of the wasps all buzzing together would begin soon after I turned the light on, and sometimes they were up before me. Collectively, they generated a deep high-voltage hum like you would get from a faulty electrical appliance. They would always gather on the grille of the windows because the brightest light usually came from here. Like a schoolboy, I'd extinguish this light and switch on the external one, listening to the immediate pitch change when I did so. Of course, they'd gradually migrate to the other bulb, although it took some of them quite a long time to realise the light source had changed. Perhaps they were sleepy like me.

By now, the sun was starting to come up over the bush land beyond the campus. At one point, just at the moment you'd describe as daybreak, when the light was enough to give some colour to the sky, the wasps stopped dead. This wasn't sudden enough to make you sit up and notice; it happened over a minute or two. There they would sit, frozen in awe (as it seemed) or else complete confusion. All buzzing ceased. And the stillness continued for about twenty minutes, after which they began to fly off, individually and randomly. The first time I saw this conglomeration, I actually thought they had all died during the night. It was spectacular in its own way.

What was going on? Were they greeting the dawn, passing chemical messages to each other in mute communion, or simply trying to calculate the position of the real sun? In their eerie unison, I couldn't help but notice the similarity with the other call to prayer which was happening a little further away on campus, every day at the same time.