WASPS, SOCIAL AND SOLITARY 



Again, we took twenty-three wasps three hundred 

 yards southeast of the nest and liberated them in an 

 open field ; thirteen flew east or south away from the 

 nest, seven west or northwest toward the nest, and four 

 returned to the starting-place and seemed unwilling to 

 venture out again. 



These observations show that the two species of 

 wasps with which we experimented have no sense of 

 direction in the form of a mysterious additional sense, 

 nor yet in the form of a power by which they keep a 

 register of the turns and changes in a journey and are 

 thus able to retrace their way. Our cage was of wire, 

 and so open -that they could see all about, as we carried 

 them from place to place; yet when they flew out, they 

 most frequently started in a wrong direction and toward 

 a point that we had not passed. In many instances, 

 however, these wasps returned to the nest, and it seems 

 highly probable that as they rose higher and higher into 

 the air, circling as they went, they discovered some lofty 

 treetop or other object that had before served them as a 

 landmark, and that in this way they were able to make 

 their way home. Bee-keepers know that if young 

 workers which, in strong hives, pass the first ten or 

 fifteen days of their lives in feeding the larvae without 

 going abroad, are taken out and set free only a short 



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