WASPS, SOCIAL AND SOLITARY 



central column, and laying therein some neuter eggs; 

 how she had then spent a month in attending carefully 

 to the beginnings of things, feeding the young larvae as 

 they hatched, and watching over them through their 

 childhood and youth; and then how her solicitude was 

 rewarded by the filial devotion with which this first set of 

 workers took upon themselves the labor of excavating, 

 building, and feeding the young, everything indeed except 

 the egg-laying. These queens, surrounded though they 

 are by respectful and attentive subjects, have much the 

 worst of it in our estimation, never going out, and passing 

 their lives in a dull routine. Through the early summer 

 only neuters are produced, but when fall approaches the 

 future generation is provided for by the development of 

 males and females. The activity of the little colony is 

 limited by the season, for as the days grow colder the 

 males and females leave the nest and mate, and a little 

 later both males and workers lose ambition, become 

 inactive and finally die, while the queens hide away in 

 protected corners to reappear in the spring. The eggs 

 and larvae, left unfed and uncared for, become a prey to 

 moulds and to hordes of insects, and thus the swarm 

 comes to an end. 



We had once made some not very successful attempts to 

 find out whether spiders had a sense of color; and seeing 



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