SOME FACTS ABOUT WASPS AND BEES. 321 



" In a favorable season, when the weather is warm and food 

 plentiful, a nest may contain many thousands of cells full of 

 wasps in various stages of development, and, as each cell is occu- 

 pied two or three times in the course of a summer, those authori- 

 ties who put the number of the members of the community as 

 high as thirty thousand are probably not far wrong. 



" At the approach of autumn the society begins to break up ; 

 the males fertilize the females while flying high in the air ; they 

 then die, often within a few hours. The workers leave the nest, 

 carrying with them any grubs that remain in the cells, and both 

 soon perish. The nest is entirely deserted. The females which 

 have been fertilized creep into crevices under stones or trees or 

 hide among moss, and hibernate until the warmth of the follow- 

 ing spring induces them to leave their hiding places and set about 

 founding a new community." 



Where hornets or wasps occur in very large numbers they fre- 

 quently, at certain seasons, do considerable damage to fruit and 

 forest trees by gnawing off the bark to build their paper nests. 

 They destroy the fruit they attack, living as they do upon the 

 juices extracted from it. But, on the other hand, these insects 

 are very useful in that they likewise feed on flies and other in- 

 sects, and so very materially diminish the numbers of these pests. 

 Some wasps live in part upon honey, which they collect from the 

 most open-petaled flowers, and thus to a very moderate extent 

 they may be regarded in the light of flower fertilizers. Kirkland 

 says, in the first volume of the American Naturalist, that " the 

 paper hornet (Vespa maculata) often enters my nucleus hives, 

 when I am rearing Italian queen bees, and captures the young 

 queen in the midst of her little colony, usually just after she has 

 commenced her first laying. I have seen this depredator enter 

 the small hive, drag out the queen, and fly away with her to the 

 woods" (page 52). Some of the species of the genus Polistes 

 store up honey which is poisonous, from the fact that it has 

 been collected from poisonous flowers. They are found in South 

 America, where also species of the genus Chartergus occur 

 wasps that make a very remarkable and tough nest, with funnel- 

 shaped combs inside, arranged one inside of another, nest fashion, 

 but not in contact except at their points of suspension. At the 

 apices of these cones occur the apertures of entrance for the in- 

 mates to pass up among the conical tiers. Icaria, a genus repre- 

 sented in Australia, the East Indies, Africa, and Madagascar, 

 contains some very remarkable species. Some of them have the 

 power of contracting the hinder segments of the abdomen so far 

 within the body that at first sight they appear to have been 

 broken off. Many of these species are very small and brilliantly 

 colored, and often build curiously shaped little paper nests. 



TOL. LI. 25 



