28 ON ENTOMOLOGY. 



tivity by the returning warmth of the season, is to discover a place suit- 

 able for her intended colony; and accordingly in the spring, Wasps may 

 be seen prying into every hole of a hedge-bank, particularly where field 

 mice have burrowed. In case of need, the Wasp is abundantly furnished 

 by nature with instruments for excavating a burrow out of the solid 

 ground, as she no doubt most commonly does; digging the earth with 

 her strong mandibles, and carrying it off, or pushing it out as she pro- 

 ceeds. The entrance gallery is about an inch or less in diameter, and 

 usually runs in a winding or zigzag direction from one to two feet in 

 depth. In the chamber to which this gallery leads, and which, when 

 completed, is from one to two feet in diameter, the Mother Wasp lays 

 the foundation of her city, beginning with the walls. 



The building materials employed by Wasps were long a matter of con- 

 jecture to scientific enquirers, for the bluish grey papery substance of 

 the whole structure, has no resemblance to any sort of wax employed by 

 Bees for a similar purpose. Now that the discovery has been made, we 

 can with difficulty bring ourselves to believe (says Rennie) that a 

 naturalist so acute and indefatigable as Reaumur, should have for 

 twenty years, as he tells us, endeavoured without success, to find out 

 the secret. At length, however, his perseverance was rewarded. He- 

 remarked a female Wasp alight on the sash of his window and begin to 

 gnaw the wood with her mandibles, and it struck him at once that she 

 was procuring materials for building. He saw her detach from the wood 

 a bundle of fibres about a tenth of an inch in length, and finer than a 

 hair ; and as she did not swallow these but gathered them into a mass 

 with her feet, he could not doubt that his first idea was correct. In a 

 short time she shifted to another part of the window-frame, carrying 

 with her the fibres she had collected, and to which she continued to add, 

 when he caught her in order to examine the nature of her bundle, and 

 he found that it was not yet moistened nor rolled into a ball, as is always 

 done before employing it in building. In every other respect it had 

 precisely the same colour and fibrous texture as the walls of a vespiary. 

 It struck him as remarkable, that it bore no resemblance to wood gnawed 

 by other insects, such as the Goat Moth Caterpillar, which is granular 

 like sawdust. This would not have suited the design of the Wasp, who 

 was well aware that fibres of some length form a stronger texture. 



He even discovered that before detaching the fibres she bruised them 

 (les charpissoit) into a sort of lint (charpie) with her mandibles. All 

 this the careful naturalist imitated by bruising and paring the same wood 

 of the window-sash with his pen-knife, till he succeeded in making a 

 little bundle of fibres scarcely to be distinguished from that collected by 

 the Wasp. The bundles of ligneous fibres thus detached, are moistened 

 before being used with a glutinous liquid, which causes them to adhere 

 together, and are then kneaded into a sort of paste or papier mache* 

 Having prepared some of this material, the Mother Wasp begins first to 

 line with it the roof of her chamber (for Wasps always build downwards)* 



