Social-Wasps. 83 



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 foundations of her city, beginning 

 with the walls. 



The building materials employed by wasps were long a 

 matter of conjecture to scientific inquirers ; for the bluish- 

 grey papery substance of the whole structure has no resem- 

 blance 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 that a naturalist 

 so acute and indefatigable as M. Keaumur, 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 procur- 

 ing 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 cater- 

 pillar, 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 charpissoii] 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 penknife, till he succeeded in making a little bundle of 



