268 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



wood, for the gamekeepers to shelter when it rains, and for several 

 seasons past hornets have suspended a nest from the interior of its 

 ceiling, flying in through the open pane of glass in its side. This year, 

 however, they have not put in an appearance there. I believe one 

 such nest in the shanty was cut down, and presented to the museum 

 at Colchester. 



During my short sojourn at this vicarage I have captured twelve 

 hornets with my net as they came successively to regale themselves on 

 the sap exuding from the trunk of an oak in the back shrubbery. I 

 note that there is hardly ever more than one hornet at a time, either 

 where the sap exudes or on a partially devoured apple. Probably there 

 is not room for the operations of both. But if one be captured thereat, 

 within a brief space (say ten minutes) another visitor, in brown and 

 yellow jerkin, flies up with a sonorous hum to take his place. Some- 

 times, but more rarely, two may be seen together seated on one apple. 

 Are these solitary visits due to some well-understood and defined 

 arrangement between themselves ? The present unsettled state of the 

 weather here (sunshine alternating with clouds and frequent showers) 

 renders the hornets all the more dangerous, as apt to creep about 

 noiselessly in a semi-torpid condition resulting from the heavy wet. 

 Query, do the queens leave the nest at this period of the year ? It 

 would seem so, as when my wife was in the orchard here a few days 

 since, on picking up a fallen apple, she heard a loud buzzing in the 

 grass close to the fruit, and in a few moments a hornet ascended a 

 blade of grass and flew away. Luckily for herself she did not touch 

 it, as at first sight she mistook it for a dragonfly, and from the size 

 which she described it could only have been a queen. 



Of late years, I have seen very few hornets in England, and during 

 the whole of my residence in my Cambridgeshire parish I only recall 

 the occurrence of one nest in the roof of a farmhouse or cottage three 

 or four doors from the rectory, and taken by an elderly parishioner to 

 whom various odd jobs were delegated, and commonly supposed to 

 possess a very thick cuticle, at any rate he went about his work 

 fearlessly. "They do horn so," he said. One of the very few occasions 

 on which I have seen a queen hornet alive was in the winter season 

 on the drawing-room window-sill of the said Cambridgeshire rectory, 

 when it was in an almost torpid state, and covered with soot, and I 

 naturally dreaded its presence on account of my children, who were 

 then very young. I remember in boyhood's hour being greatly diverted 

 at beholding an hornet sweep in its flight into a hole in the side of a 

 large jargonelle pear, and no fewer than twenty wasps forthwith to 

 tumble out therefrom in a state of the most abject terror to the ground. 

 In those days also a relative observed a hornet seated on the bough of 

 an apple tree, and tearing a hive bee to pieces for the sake of its 

 honey-bag. The hornet does not always score, however, for while two 

 English ladies were walking in the environs of Chexbres (Lake of 

 Geneva) in the month of July, 1893, while ^held the chaplaincy of 

 that place, they recounted to me how a wasp and hornet dropped 

 struggling together from an orchard tree in front of them, and how the 

 wasp, being more agile, managed to dart about and sting his adversary 

 here and there until the latter succumbed. — (Eev.) F. A. Walker; 

 Assington Vicarage, near Colchester, August 24th, 1897. 



