Jason Whitney, age 13, of Birmingham, Ala., for his question:

IS THE WASP A GOOD INSECT?

The wasp is a stinging insect that is related to both the bees and the ants. Scientists tell us that the wasp is among the most interesting and intelligent insects on earth and that it is also helpful to man. While some wasps damage fruit, they also destroy large numbers of harmful insects.

Wasps do far more good than they do harm.

All sorts of homes are built by the wasps. Some build their houses of mud while others make nests of paper. Some wasps dig caves in the earth and others saw out cells in wood.

The home building is done strictly for the young, or larvae. When the house is finished, the female goes out to find food for the house. Different types of wasps are very particular about their diets. Some will eat only spiders, some only beetles and others will eat only flies.

The mother in each species must travel to find just the right insect for her baby. Once it is found, the wasp carefully inserts its poison laden stings into the insect's nerve centers. This poison paralyzes the insect until the young wasps axe ready to eat it.

All wasps have four transparent wings and three pairs of legs. Females and workers always have long, slender stinging organs attached to the lower parts of the bodies. The drones, as the males are called, do not sting and therefore have no stinging organs.

The body of a wasp is usually more slender and less hairy than that of a bee. Also, a wasp will rarely have pollen baskets on its legs. It lives on on the juices of fruits and on insects. Some wasps live entirely on honey.

The wasp comes in different sizes. Some are tiny insects just a fraction of an inch in length. The largest of the wasps is the hornet.

There are more than 20,000 known species of wasps. They form two groups: the social wasps that work together to build homes and supply food for their young and the solitary wasp that always works alone.     

The social wasps live in colonies like those of the bees. Hoxnets and yellow jackets are included in this classification.

Social wasps are divided into three classes: queens, workers and drones. Unlike the bees, their colonies do not last year after year. Each year almost the whole colony is lost because of the cold winter. Only a few queens survive to build up the colony the following spring.

In the spring a queen will come out of the crevice where she has spent the winter and set out to build a new home. She will build a few cells shaped like cones. In each cell she lays an egg. The larvae which hatch from the eggs are soft grubs. The queen tends them, chewing up the bodies of insects for two weeks, and brings the food to the grubs.

Finally the larvae spin tough cocoons around themselves and they go through a change called pupation. In about 10 days they come out of the cocoon as full grown wasps.