100 Insect Architecture. 



are several other specimens, varying considerably both in 

 shape and size.] 



.Few circumstances are more striking, with regard to 

 insects, as Kirby and Spence justly remark, than the great 

 and incessant labour which maternal affection for their 

 progeny leads them to undergo. Some of these exertions are 

 so disproportionate to the size of the insect, that nothing 

 short of ocular conviction could attribute them to such an 

 agent. A wild bee, or a wasp, for instance, as we have seen, 

 will dig a hole in a hard bank of earth some inches deep, and 

 five or six times its own size, labouring unremittingly at this 

 arduous task for several days in succession, and scarcely 

 allowing itself a moment for eating or repose. It will then 

 occupy as much time in searching for- a store of food ; and 

 no sooner is this finished, than it will set about repeating the 

 process, and, before it dies, will have completed five or six 

 similar cells, or even more. 



We shall have occasion more particularly to dwell upon 

 the geometrical arrangement of the cells, both of the wasp 

 and of the social-bee, in our description of those interesting 

 operations, which have long attracted the notice, and com- 

 manded the admiration of mathematicians and naturalists. 

 A few observations may here be properly bestowed upon the 

 material with which the wasp-family construct the interior of 

 their nests. 



The wasp is a paper-maker, and a most perfect and 

 intelligent one. While mankind were arriving, by slow 

 degrees, at the art of fabricating this valuable substance, the 

 wasp was making it before their eyes, by very much the 

 same process as that by which human hands now manufacture 

 it with the best aid of chemistry and machinery. While 

 some nations carved their records on wood, and stone, and 

 brass, and leaden tablets, others, more advanced, wrote with 

 a style on wax, others employed the inner bark of trees, and 

 others the skins of animals rudely prepared, the wasp was 

 manufacturing a firm and durable paper. Even when the 

 papyrus was rendered more fit, by a process of art, for the 

 transmission of ideas in writing, the wasp was a better artisan 



