Wasps and Such. 167 



the very first thing it does when it comes out, brand, 

 splinter new, is to clean its antennae. 



The first ones to come out are workers, not so brightly 

 colored as the queen. When one of them wants some- 

 thing to eat, the queen feeds it. Perhaps it has some 

 sort of a fondness for the cell in which it has spent five 

 days in the egg, nine days as a. grub, and thirteen days 

 as a pupa, for while it is yet a young adult it creeps into an 

 empty cell, but, dear friends, things can never again be 

 as they were with any of us. The simple, trusting faith 

 of childhood when one hung head downward and opened 

 one's mouth at every jar of the comb, confident that it was 

 mother come with something to eat, is gone forever, and 

 the young wasp goes into the cell sting end outward. 



Now that the young workers are able to do something 

 the queen gives all her attention to laying eggs. The 

 children do the housework and build the additions. Wasp 

 after wasp comes in with a wet pellet of paper pulp and 

 draws it into a cord and flattens it out with her jaws, until 

 it is a little ribbon. Nobody is foreman of the job and 

 gives orders where to put this and that, but all w r ork 

 anywhere and seemingly anyhow. Dr. Ormond thinks 

 that only the young wasps do the building and nursing. 

 They are larger and not so ragged-looking compared 

 with the older ones, which seem to have all they can do 

 hunting. The nest keeps on growing and the combs hang 

 from each other ; the stout pillar being in the center, and 

 other pillars where necessary. The top of one comb is 

 the floor of the public hall to the apartments overhead. 

 It is not as with the bees that build their combs up and 

 down, with horizontal cells backing each other. Tow r ard 

 the end of the season the cells get bigger, and the 

 workers are almost as large as the queen. 



As with the bees, some are told off to fan and keep the 



