SOME ANNOYING PESTS OF MAN 327 



its nest among the branches of trees or attached to the 

 projecting eaves of houses and barns. These nests are 

 often very large and always more or less conical in shape 

 with an opening at the bottom. They are always covered 

 with a stout, thick gray papery material collected from 

 old stumps, rails, and boards. 



A community of wasps is very much unlike a colony of 

 honey bees in that all of the wasps desert the nest in the 

 fall and the males and workers all die, leaving only the 

 queens who crawl away into protected nooks and crannies 

 to pass the winter. In the spring, the queens come forth 

 from their winter hiding places and start new homes. 

 Each one begins by making a small nest in which she lays 

 a few eggs. These hatch and produce only workers, 

 which immediately relieve the queen of all her labors 

 except that of laying eggs. The workers now begin to 

 enlarge the nest, bring food, and look after the young. 

 The activities and increase of the community go on during 

 the summer season until fall, when the home is broken up, 

 leaving only the queens to survive the winter season. 



There are other wasps known as Polistes, that often 

 build their nests in the attics of houses. These wasps are 

 dark in color and have a spindle-shaped abdomen united 

 with the thorax by a slender waist. They build a nest 

 composed of a single comb suspended by a short stem 

 from its support. The comb is not covered with an 

 envelope of paper but is left perfectly bare. The Polistes 

 wasps are not pugnacious and may be considered generally 

 harmless, for they rarely sting. 



Hornets as fly catchers. — The bald-faced hornet, 

 especially, catches many house-flies as food for the young 

 wasp larvae. A correspondent of the Rural New Yorker 



