286 WASP STUDIES AFIELD 



have never succeeded in finding them. It seems as though 

 it is normal for the males to die of exhaustion after fertiliz- 

 ing the queens, but it might be possible for some unfor- 

 tunate ones, with no opportunity to function sexually, to 

 retain sufficient vitality to prolong their longevity. 



While all species of Polistes customarily place their nests 

 in buildings, we found several very large last-year's nests 

 on shrubs in a small, uncultivated patch of ground, about 

 fifty by one hundred feet, in the Illinois valley. (See fig. 

 51.) Wheat- fields surrounded it on all sides. The nests 

 were attached to the bushes about four or five feet from 

 the ground. The striking feature was that several of these 

 old nests had a number of queens of P. annularis clustering 

 upon them. It was April 24, 1914, just the time in the 

 spring when the wasp queens would be likely to go house- 

 hunting. They may have been only resting on these old 

 nests, but we have long had a notion, and so have other 

 writers, that they sometimes use old nests, and that more 

 than one queen sometimes finds a home on such a nest; 

 hence we accepted this evidence in partial confirmation of 

 our impressions. The following table shows the number of 

 queens that were at rest on each nest : 



No. nests No. queens on each 

 i o 



3 i 



3 5 



i 6 



i 16 



Besides this, we found several new nests in the making, 

 of three or four cells each, some containing eggs, and pre- 

 sided over by queens as follows : 



