the wasp is villainous and the butterfly saintly… first impressions that hold true if one takes the black-and-white approach, but wander into the realms of grey, as natural processes often tend to do, and there is hardly any good or bad, seldom anything unconvoluted, and never anyone invincible…

the immensity of these microcosms can be bewildering at times… for the ambles of the arthropods meander into the metaphysical with such nonchalance that they literally throw a spanner in the works, the cathedrals of consciousness built and elucidated through the rigorous ponderings of savants over centuries deconstructed like dominoes in the spur of a moment, epiphanies buzzing through the air, perching a while for one to grasp, before disappearing into the thickets again…

thus I mulled over scratching some mosquito bites on a humid afternoon in the middle of some thorny bushes, a wasp hovering intently over a clump on one side, and a restive butterfly flitting from flower to flower on the other… the wasp quite colourful and the butterfly rather unvarnished in this instance…

the wasp hunts the butterfly, though mostly to feed its young, for critter kids are usually gluttonous… in some cases, laying eggs inside caterpillars to set in motion that gruesome parasitic life cycle… what is the bane of the caterpillar is at times a boon for the farmer or the gardener, pest control à la naturally… interestingly, even adult wasps, like butterflies, feed mostly on nectar… all that violent hustle is the folly of youth it seems, nipping life in the bud itself, so that whatever survives subsists maturely…

the butterfly was an

the butterfly was a small branded swift (Pelopidas mathias), a skittish customer, and the wasp looking like a member of subfamily Philanthinae of Crabronidae group as far as I could find out later… wizened adults with the sole purpose in life is to feed the frenzy of their progenies…

, a skittish customer, and the wasp looking like a member of subfamily Philanthinae of Crabronidae group as far as I could find out later… wizened adults with the sole purpose in life is to feed the frenzy of their progenies…

musings on a wasp and a butterfly, Noida, Uttar Pradesh…