544 



THE FLORAL "WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



sion of the ripest lie can find, if we should happen to want that 

 particular plum or nectarine, and disturb him in his feast, knocking 

 him roughly, perhaps, as we detach it from the branch — he treats us 

 as marauders and invaders of Ids rights, and stings us. He comes 

 in at our open windows, attracted perhaps by the scent of sugar on 

 our tables, and if we attempt to do battle with him as he flies about 

 in search of the sugar-basin, he will again sting us in self-defence. 

 Let us on such occasions remind ourselves that during the former 

 part of his life, before fruit was ripe or windows left open, the wasp 

 was feeding on just the laud of matter that we are glad to get rid of, 

 and that before his taste for sweets has come to him he has been 

 performing the office of scavenger, and feasting on putrid and im- 

 pure animal substances of all kinds ; and should we like to exchange 

 the feeling of enmity too often nourished against him for one of 

 wonder and admiration at his powers and clever works, let us find 

 out all we can of his curious lite and ways. 



Like bees and ants, the wasps we are sure to find in our gardens, 

 live in communities, and have among them males, females, and 

 neuters or working wasps. Their nests, too, which contain something 

 like the combs of the bee-hives, are found in banks and hollow trees, 

 and such situations as are selected by wild bees for their nests. The 

 cells of wasps prepared for the reception of the eggs, from which the 

 larva? or grubs are hatched, and in which they are carefully fed by 

 nursing wasps, and where they undergo the transformation into 

 pupa? before becoming perfect wasps — these small cradles for their 

 future population are formed, not of wax like the cells of bees, nor 

 of any substance at all resembling it, but of a sort of paper made of 

 fine sawdust. Just of such a substance as we manufacture of paper 

 and call papier-mache, or mashed paper, arc formed the comb of wasps. 



Instead of collecting materials from 

 flowers and digesting it into wax, as does 

 the bee, the wasp rasps off fine fibres of 

 wood from any paling, dead tree, or gate- 

 post that he can get at, and mixing it 

 with some gummy liquid, which his own 

 body supplies, makes a pulp, which he 

 spreads out into thin sheets of paper, 

 and first lining the walls of the round 

 nest with many layers of these, after- 

 wards with the same material forms the 

 cells, which like storeys of numerous 

 small apartments, fill up the nest. 



The labour undergone by wasps in 

 preparing their nests is even more won- 

 derful than what is performed by bees 

 within the hives which we prepare for them, and it seems to com- 

 bine the mining and excavating power of the ant with the building 

 talent of the bee, since the first operation towards the foundation of 

 a wasp colony, is the hollowing out of a long horizontal tunnel in 

 some bank, with a large oval cave at the end, sufficiently capacious 

 to be fitted up afterwards with layers of the tiny cradles wanted for 



Section of WASPa' Nest, 

 showuog layers of cells. 



i 



