1912] Turner — An Orphan Colony of Polisfes PaUipes Lepel 189 



to tlie outside. A few moments later I found her hovering before 

 the insectary, with her face towards the building, repeatedly 

 ascending and descending and moving now to the right and now 

 to the left in irregular curves; she seemed to be inspecting the 

 front wall of the shed. Shortly the wasp flew into my neighbor's 

 yard and I reentered the insectary to await developments. Twenty 

 muiutes later she returned with a ball of malaxated food in her 

 jaws and proceeded to feed the wasps on the nest and to enter, 

 one by one, the uncapped cells. Once these cells contained living 

 wasp larvse; but now they were either empty or occupied by the 

 dried remains of the dead. A few days ago the last large larva had 

 woven its cocoon and the last of the small ones had died. For 

 several days this wasp continued to hunt and on her return always 

 entered the uncapped cell. Had the "widow-mother" lived, each 

 cell would have contained a larva or an egg, and the worker wasps 

 would have fed them. Following an instinctive tendency to feed 

 the hungry babes that normally would occupy those cells, this 

 wasp repeatedl}^ entered those tenantless cells with food. It was 

 a pathetic sight to watch the creature repeatedly and industriously 

 attempting to perform an impossible instinctive function. 



On the night of September the first a wasp emerged from one of 

 the recently capped cells. Another emerged the following night, 

 and in a few days wasps had emerged from all of the newly capped 

 cells. While in the larval stage these wasps fasted from the 

 seventh to the fifteenth of August. From the fifteenth to the nine- 

 teenth the only food they received was honey. From the nine- 

 teenth until the cells were capped they received the normal food 

 of such larvae. Yet these insects emerged in perfect form. This 

 result was a surprise to me. Margaret Morley ^ fed four larvae 

 of a species of Polistes (she does not state which species) on maple 

 sugar and raw egg. One of them died before weaving its cocoon; 

 three wove cocoons that were thin and transparent, but none 

 emerged from the cocoons. Of the three that constructed cocoons, 

 one fell out and died and two died in the cells without developing 

 their wings. Since she fed her wasps for three weeks they were 

 probably much younger than mine when they lost their natural 

 nurses. 



^ Op. cit., pp. 177-181. 



