WASPS, SOCIAL AND SOLITARY 



begin to lay male eggs, thus taking from the queen a 

 part of her burden and leaving her free to produce 

 neuters and females. The nest that we were watching 

 was found, at the end of the season, to contain 4661 

 wasps in various stages of development, and others that 

 we opened had from two to four thousand. This is no- 

 thing to the social wasps of China, where a single house- 

 hold is made up of from fifteen to twenty thousand mem- 

 bers; but China is a thickly populated country, and per- 

 haps with wasps as with human beings several families 

 live in a single domicile. 



Outside of their wonderful social instincts our wasps 

 are found wanting in the higher gifts of emotion and in- 

 tellect. When we killed a number of them and placed 

 them near the nest, their nearest relatives wasted no time 

 in mourning, nor yet in revenge, but calmly cut up the 

 bodies and fed them to the ever hungry young ones. If 

 we placed some rich and tempting morsels at a distance, 

 two or three would discover them, and would go back 

 and forth all day without telling the others about it, as 

 ants would have done under like circumstances. When 

 we obstructed the opening to their nest by lightly laying 

 blades of grass across, the day passed without its occur- 

 ring to the wasps to lift them away, although they suf- 

 fered the greatest inconvenience in getting in and out, 



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