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Art. XVIII. — Notice of a Nest of Vespa Britannica. By George 

 Newman, Jim. 



The nest in question was suspended from a slender branch of the 

 spruce fir, not more than an inch in circumference. It was nearly sphe- 

 rical, and rather more than twenty-one inches in circumference ; the 

 only aperture was at the lowest part, so that the wasps must have flown 

 upwards, in order to enter the nest ; the aperture was an inch and a 

 half in diameter, and its edges were ragged and apparently torn. 



On making a vertical section of the nest, I found it to consist of an 

 exterior wall or covering, and a number of combs. This wall was 

 composed of fifteen sheets of the thin, dingy-coloured, papery sub- 

 stance which all kinds of wasps employ in the fabrication of their nests. 

 The sheets hung loosely one over the other, each being occasionally 

 joined to the next by some glutinous secretion : the entire wall was 

 rather more than an inch in thickness. The internal cavity was nearly 

 spherical, the upper portion being occupied by a number of small 

 chambers, composed of the same substance as the walls. These cham- 

 bers were now perfectly empty. Below this were five combs or ranges 

 of cells ; each comb was deeply concave above and convex below ; 

 the mouths of the cells all opened downwards, and the inferior surface 

 of each comb being from its convexity of considerably greater super- 

 ficies than the superior surface, each cell was consequently larger at 

 its mouth than at its base. The combs were united together by 

 strong condensed portions of the papery substance attached to the 

 central cells of the underside, and the central portion of the upper 

 surface of each comb : the combs were not attached to the covering 

 or wall of the nest. The first or upper comb contained two hundred 

 and fourteen cells ; the second, four hundred and sixteen ; the third, 

 three hundred and fifty -three ; the fourth, one hundred and fifty-one ; 

 the fifth contained no perfect cell, but fifty-eight rudimentary ones, 

 which had never been used for the purposes of the hive ; similar 

 to these cells were many others surrounding each of the combs. The 

 average depth of the perfect cells was 4u of an inch, and their diame- 

 ter at the mouth -^. More than seven-eighths of the cells were empty, 

 but those round the margin of each comb were still closed with highly 

 convex and papery covers, evidently constructed by the perfect insect, 

 and were not anything approaching to a cocoon spun by the larvae. 

 On removing these covers, each cell was found to contain a male wasp. 



George Newman. 



