ARCHITECTURE. 191 
waste of money, into an ugly, inconvenient house. 
For labour is the lot and pleasure of the wasp, who 
must and will work, so long as she has a nest, while 
the sun shines. And waste, in the sense of con- 
suming as much rotten wood as possible, is one of 
the chief objects of her existence. 
The details of the process of construction are the 
same in all our British Vespide, under all circum- 
stances. Tree-wasps and ground-wasps, whether 
they use grass-fibres, or rotten-wood, or paper- 
cuttings, work up the material in precisely the same 
manner, and lay it on according to the same teach- 
ings of their common instinct. Stand quietly on the 
sunny side of a row of palings on a summer morning, 
and you may observe the first step in the process of 
building a nest. Here will be found wasps of all the 
species in the neighbourhood, hard at work collecting 
materials for their nests. Wasps may easily be taken 
while thus engaged, in a gloved hand or a handker- 
chief, and the pellet which they hold between their 
mandibles will be found, on examination by the 
microscope, to be identical in composition with the 
substance of which their nests are made. But the 
wood-scrapings which they come to gather off any 
old gate or posts, with such indifference to danger, 
are not by any means the only, nor indeed the chief 
materials employed by most species. Round the 
swampy edges of ponds, or in wet ditches, or on the 
downy leaves of plants, wasps may be seen gathering 
tough herbaceous filaments which they felt up ito a 
texture stronger and better able to resist the wind 
and rain than a paper made of wood-scrapings. Only 
