Natural History 529 



stage. With the coming of spring she reawakens, and the sea- 

 son's activities are soon in full swing. The queen's first care is 

 to choose a suitable site for the nest she is about to build, and a 

 cavity in the shelter of the gnarled roots of an overthrown tree 

 is as good as any. Then she sets to work to collect wood-fibre, 

 which she rasps with her jaws from posts and palings. This 

 wood-pulp she kneads with her saliva into the "paper" with 

 which the nest is built. She spreads the first layer on the root 

 she has chosen as the foundation from which to hang the struc- 

 ture, and gradually, hour by hour, pellet by pellet, she moulds 

 a disc, and then a stalk, and then a canopy to shelter the first 

 layer of cells. In each cell as it is completed she deposits an egg, 

 which she cements to the cell-wall, for the open end of the cell is 

 directed downwards. 



In a few days the legless grubs emerge, and the queen be- 

 comes a nurse as well as a home-builder, until the older grubs 

 mature, and a staff of worker wasps is ready to take on the 

 manual labour and allow the queen to devote herself to egg-lay- 

 ing. The workers add to the original comb and suspend a new 

 storey from it by little stalks. One storey is added after another. 

 The rounded outer covering is also extended, by being hollowed 

 out inside and added to outside. This outer envelope may consist 

 of as many as a dozen layers of the paper, which is a water-proof 

 and non-conducting material, so that the necessary tempera- 

 ture for the development of the young is kept up. The entrance 

 opening of the envelope is always at the foot of the pendant 

 nest, and all the openings of the combs point towards it, so that 

 the young are reared in inverted cradles. 



The young wasp grub at first keeps its position by clinging 

 with its tail to the egg envelope while it pokes its head out for 

 food, but later it uses its jaws and a sort of sucker-foot on its 

 tail as grasping organs. If it does happen to fall out, the 

 worker nurses will probably throw it out of the nest, just as 

 they do with rubbish when thev are cleaning. The first thing 



