152 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



that some aerial mushroom had grown there. One 

 is tempted to wonder whether the ambitious queen 

 had hoped to fill the whole room with the combs of 

 her city. 



We see in the garden many wasps far more 

 elegantly shaped than any of the paper-wasps. They 

 are all dressed in the family colours of black and 

 yellow, and all have the family predilection for the 

 flesh of other creatures. Whether we are to regard 

 the social wasps as in advance of the solitary wasps, 

 or vice versa, will furnish a good moot subject for the 

 communist and individualist to argue out. We would 

 state the degrees of waspdom on the supposition that 

 progress is from the solitary to the social. The 

 solitary wasps have not yet learned the art of paper- 

 making. They dig, however, more skilfully than the 

 ground-wasp, drilling exquisitely accurate tunnels in 

 which they store the provender of the future grub. 

 Others bore in wood tinier galleries to fit their tinier 

 bodies, and stuff each cell with nearly a score of 

 gnats. But the best of them all, a creature with 

 exquisitely thin gold bands upon a shiny black body, 

 brings nicely mixed mortar, with which she builds on 

 the side of the house a very effective weather-proof 

 wigwam. Within, this is divided into three or four 

 rooms, and each room is stored with six green 

 caterpillars or more. When the mother-wasp has 

 gone her egg hatches out, and the grub eats the 

 caterpillars alive. They have been stung into quies- 

 cence but not death by the careful mother. 



Here is exquisite care for one's unborn progeny 

 whom one is not to see. It far transcends the 

 instinctive forethought of the butterfly, which merely 



