396 



Marvels of Insect Life. 



she thought she would rest awhile till that irascible woman had calmed down. 

 There, clinging by her jaws to the fore-edge of that particular book, she went to 

 sleep, and as nobody in that family wanted to read about man's place in 

 Nature, she continued to sleep all through the winter. It was not until the 

 incidence of the domestic upheaval known as " spring cleaning," when the 

 books were taken out of the shelves for their annual dusting, that she was 

 disturbed. The duster swept her from her hold, and she fell to the floor unnoticed. 

 Bruised and stiff she crawled awa}^ and after brushing and shaking the dust off 

 her wings and corselet, and washing her face and hands, she climbed out of the 

 window into the spring sunshine, which soon made her feel alive again. Then 

 she remembered a dream she had dreamt during her long winter sleep. According 



to her dream she was to be 

 a queen, and to reign over 

 a populous city of her own 

 foundation. It was time 

 she set about her dream's 

 falftlment. 



All the sunny hours — 

 they were not many — of 

 that April day she flew 

 about and sought the 

 ideal site for a wasp-city, 

 but could not find it. In 

 the afternoon she crawled 

 beneath a piece of loose 

 bark on a dead oak-tree, 

 and went to sleep for the 



night. 



The next mornmg 



Photo by] [E. SIcf, /•'./-. S. 



A Queen-Wasp. 



Lately awakciud fi'oiu her long winter sleep, the queen-wasp luoks abont lur for a snitable 

 site for the foundations of her future city, whose first walls and comb she builds without 

 aid. As she is one of the underground builders her choice will probably fall upon a mouse's 

 tunnel in which she can excavate a I'oomy hall. I-our times the actual si/Ce. 



she found that the tree 

 itself had many tunnels in 

 its decayed wood, where 

 beetles or other boring 

 Insects had once exca- 

 vated ; and one of tliese 

 led to a quite roomy hollow in the centre of the trunk. But on reaching 

 this hall, she found a hornet-princess in })ossession. The hornet-princess 

 was a sort of cousin, and confided to her that at last she had found a suitable place 

 for the foundation of Iicr city. vSo the wasp-princess retired, and resumed her search. 

 After a weary round of explorations that came to nothing satisfactory, she had the 

 good luck to find the entrance to a mouse's tunnel in a hedge-bank, and she could 

 tell from the absence of any mousy smell that it had long been vacant. So she 

 explored it, and found that a short distance along the tunnel there was a little 

 hollow, which could be rounded and made larger by a little hard work. So she 

 set to work at once upon the roof, digging out pellets of earth with her jaws and 

 carr^nng them outside, through the tunnel. After considerable labour she came 



