Like all the others of the wasp tribe they become either lazy or disenchanted with community or dare I say communist life. During their two or three weeks of life each member has had to work and with no time off to themselves. Their lives are selfless, but sexless too. So they do not have a lot of fun. They built that huge paper football in the attic, gnawing endlessly at the old wooden posts on the field boundaries, and bringing back the pulp all chewed into the different colours from chestnut, oak, or larch, making terraced galleries round and round with their great big yellow jaws. They have hunted the garden for flies and solitary bees that nest in the lawn, and dragged off the bodies to be fed all nicely chewed into a paste, for the young ones in their cells. These hornets have often worked at night if it were warm enough. I have often heard them on the balmier nights foraging for drone flies and lacewings in the ivy flowers on the oak trees. But all of a sudden, summer is over, the young have flown, the queen has died, the drones have been off chasing the young queens and the workers’ days are redundant. So they have come down onto my muck heap to get sozzled. They have found the odd fermenting apple, and tasted the delights of rough cider, or “tangley-legs” as they call scrumpy in Devon. That has made them argumentative. The red admirals like a drop or two of the hard stuff too, before they go into the big sleep of winter. The big butterflies with their huge warning flags of red, white and black wings flapped these into the faces of the hornets. The hornets tried to grapple with those big hairy bodies but the admirals skipped sideways. The hornets tried to cover their drinks like falcons mantling prey but the butterflies uncoiled long tongue-like suction pipes and sucked the drinks over the backs of the hornets. The cider was so strong they all started to fall into a heap. The scene was one of crapulous hilarity. Nobody was the loser or the victor so they just had to resort to crawling about on all sixes and hoped nobody got hurt. The party lasted while the Harvest Moon gave sunny days but the nights then became too cold, and the admirals went into their cosy niches in the ivy and the hornets slumbered into oblivion. Richard Williamson