Word: daubers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Shafer had had a full, busy career as professor of physiology at Stanford University. On the first morning of the college year after "Emeritus" was added to his former title, Professor Shafer, feeling lonely and at loose ends, wandered into his beehouse. There he began to watch a mud-dauber wasp as she buzzed purposefully to the window sill, stretched her forefeet out like a kitten, and took a sun bath. She seemed to know exactly what she was about. In a matter of minutes Shafer's admiration was aroused and he found a new and absorbing interest...
Nine years later, old Professor Shafer published a sprightly brief of his findings : The Ways of a Mud Dauber (Stanford University Press; $2.50), a slender (74 pp.) book telling what he learned about Sceliphron cementarium during several happy summers. The volume is dedicated to a crippled mud dauber, "Crumple-Wing," of which Shafer was especially fond...
Tidy Habits. From Crumple-Wing and her kin, Shafer learned some inside details of the mud dauber's life cycle. One of the most striking was the insect's built-in sanitary facilities. Each egg is laid in a separate mud cell, along with perhaps a dozen spiders which have been paralyzed by the mother wasp's sting. After the larva hatches from the egg, it begins to eat the spiders...
...larva has a closed alimentary canal. All the waste matter from its heavy protein diet is stored in an internal sac until the baby mud dauber has finished its food store. Then the larva develops an anus and excretes the entire sac into a back compartment of its bedchamber. It seals off the narrow connecting passage with a blob of quick-hardening cement, secreted especially for the purpose, so that it can spend the winter hygienically in the clean, dry front chamber...
...Zazes based their arguments on the right of the union to freedom of speech and cited anti-injunction laws to point up their appeal for a reversal of a lower-court decision restraining the union from picketing. Lockwood and Dauber, for the company, claimed that the union was trying to force their clients out of business and was therefore not entitled to the protection of the laws in its picketing activities...