162 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
Now, honey has many things to commend it to 
house-keeping wasps, but there are difficulties in 
the way of their collecting it, or storing it, like bees. 
Wasps have neither tongues to collect it from the 
flowers, nor proper cells to store it in when collected. 
The tongue of Nectarinia is shorter even than that 
of our British species, and the cells are no better 
fitted to keep a fluid in than theirs are, being made, 
just like those, of paper, lined, if at all, with an old 
cocoon, and with no other means of closing the top 
than a paper covering. It is very prudential thus to 
lay honey by against a time of need, though one 
would wish the honey were better. But bee-keepers 
know very well where British wasps get their honey 
from, and I fear that the foreign species must procure 
it im the same way, at the expense of the bees. 
Their stores serve only a temporary purpose, just 
like bee-bread; for it is not likely that insects whose 
life is only of a few weeks duration should lay by 
provisions for a time they are never to see. And I 
will not say much in praise of honey-making wasps. 
As we clear away the fat-masses, the hollow viscera 
rise up from the cavity of the abdomen, swelled by 
imbibition of water, to such a size, that one almost 
wonders how they could ever have been packed 
away in so small a space. With the fat-masses are 
tangled threads, some of them trachex, others long 
glandular tubes, which we must take care not entirely 
to remove, as they are a very important part of the 
digestive organs. Now, if we lift out the two large 
air vesicles, which occupy the upper part of the 
abdominal cavity, on either side, we shall find, con- 
cealed, between and behind them, a little pear-shaped 
