METHODS OF NEST-BUILDING. 269 



closed below, so as only to leave the requisite aperture for 

 Wasp passage. 



From this time, if all goes well with the colony, the work 

 goes on regularly. The queen continues to lay eggs, and the 

 egg condition is stated to last eight days, the larva state 

 thirteen or fourteen, and that of the pupa about ten ; thus 

 (speaking generally) in about a month from the time of the 

 first eggs being laid, the first Wasps of the season begin to 

 make their appearance. These are all abortive females, 

 known as workers, and as they keep on developing in steady 

 succession, from the succession of eggs laid by the queen, 

 they carry on the labours of the rapidly increasing com- 

 munity. Successive tiers of horizontal comb, with cells on 

 the lower sides, have to be built to receive the eggs and 

 accommodate the grubs, and the outside of the nest has to be 

 enlarged correspondingly, until, in the case of the common 

 Wasps, it may be of a somewhat spherical shape of any size 

 from two or three to eight or more inches in diameter. The 

 Hornets' nest is very likely not entirely spherical, but built 

 against the side of a cavity in an old tree ; also the paper is 

 of a coarser kind. The largest specimen I have seen was 

 fully nineteen inches in height by fifteen in breadth. 



The building of the outside of the nest is carried on by the 

 workers stripping or rasping up small quantities of wood or 

 vegetable material, and working these with moisture from 

 their mouths into little pellets, which each worker carries 

 home, as it is commonly described, in her jaws, but (from my 

 own observation of the process) I should rather say under them, 

 tucked, as it were, under her chin. Thus her jaws are free 

 for work, and when she gets to her nest (in the case of a kind 

 like that figured at the heading), then placing herself firmly 

 in an inverted position, with three legs on each side of the 

 edge of paper to be enlarged, she walks backward, spreading 

 out her soft paper pellet with her jaws until it forms a little 

 stripe securely joined to the former paper, but differing in 

 colour according to the tint of the wood, or vegetable material, 

 of which it has been made. 



The horizontal layers of comb within the nest are formed 

 of the same kind of paper as the outside casing of the nest, 

 each comb being suspended from the layer above it by short 

 strong pillars of the Wasp-paper material, thus giving conve- 

 nient room for traffic of the workers on the flat top of each 

 comb whilst attending to the needs of the young family in 

 the cells of the comb immediately above them. All the 

 labours (excepting egg-laying), whether building or repairing, 

 fetching materials and food, clearing out rubbish, &c., have 

 to be carried out by the workers, and in the case of ground- 



