THE SOCIAL INSECTS 



resting undisturbed until the next spring. Under natural 

 conditions they pass into complete immobility with wings 

 and legs folded up, and they do not begin to move again 

 until March or April. Almost at once, on becoming active 

 they begin to look for a nesting-site. In the two commonest 

 English species, the common wasp and the German wasp, 

 this is usually a hole underground, often an old rat- or mouse- 

 hole. Here the queen builds her first nest. This, like those 

 of all the social wasps, is made of a sort of paper. The paper 

 is formed from wood fibres scraped from posts, palings, 

 stems of dry hogweed or rotten wood. The marks of wasps' 

 mandibles can be seen on almost any unpainted wood fence in 

 England, forming little scratches often tending to run into 

 lines. The wood fibres are chewed up with saliva to make a 

 paste which when spread out thin dries into a grey or 

 brownish paper. The common wasp uses mainly rotten 

 wood and its paper is yellower, softer and more brittle ; the 

 German wasp, so-called because the eighteenth-century ento- 

 mologists received specimens from that country, uses sound 

 wood, and its paper is greyer and tougher. 



The beginning of the nest is a little pillar, hanging often 

 from a root which projects downwards from the roof of the 

 hole. At the end of the pillar (which is about half an inch 

 long) is built a cell, and round the sides of the first one others 

 are added. The beginning of the first cell is a hemisphere, 

 hanging upside down; the second cell starts as a sort of 

 crescent-shaped pocket on one side of the first. Later cells 

 are added in the angle between two earlier cells. When a few 

 cells have been started the queen begins building envelopes. 

 These are dome-shaped covers attached near the point from 

 which the pillar hangs or, in the later envelopes, to an earlier 

 one. They form cup-like domes over the cells and later com- 

 pletely enclose them except for a small more or less circular 



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