184 ENTOMOLOGY. 



said to form a nest, sometimes. a foot in diameter, by draw- 

 ing living leaves together without detaching them from the 

 branch, and uniting them with a fine white web. We 

 wonder at the instinct of the tailor-bird, but there are 

 thousands of species of insects which show as much intel- 

 ligence in sewing together their shelters. Another Indian 

 ant makes a small nest, about half an inch or more in 

 diameter, of some paper-like material, which it fixes on a 

 leaf. In Brazil certain ants construct large nests, called 

 "negro-heads," which resemble wasp-nests, being attached 

 like them to the branches of trees, though on removing 

 the outer wraps they are found to differ in having no regu- 

 lar cells, but consist of intricate curved galleries leading 

 into the interior chambers and passages. 



But it is in the nests of wasps and bees that we have 

 constructions which attest the highest degree of architec- 

 tural skill known in the animal creation, those of man 

 alone excepted. It is to be observed, however, that here, 

 as elsewhere, Nature does not make a leap. She does not 

 present us at the outset with fully developed paper-wasps' 

 nests and colonies, or the highly complicated nest and 

 colony of the honey-bee. These were, without much doubt, 

 gradual developments, the results of many failures and 

 successes of which we have no record. There is a long 

 series of wasps, for example, whose nests show different 

 degrees of complexity, which gradually lead up to the nest 

 of the paper- wasp with its numerous cells arranged in 

 several stories, and all walled in by papery layers. 



We have first simple holes excavated in the sand by the 

 Sphcx ichneumonea (Fig. 223). We have noticed a com- 

 pany of nearly a dozen of these large reddish wasps, whose 

 bodies are covered by a rich golden pubescence. Each one 

 for itself — for in these solitary wasps there is no combined 

 action — began to dig its hole in a gravelly walk, removing 

 the little stones and coarse grains of sand with its jaws; 

 as the hole deepened it loosened the earth with its jaws, 

 and threw it out of the hole both with its jaws and fore 



