204 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
had been thrown together into a fern case for the 
benefit of the chickens, sent to me. One nest was of 
a dark brown colour, composed chiefly of herbaceous 
filaments. The other was of the more familiar fawn 
colour, and composed of fragments of rotten wood. 
When the wasps recovered from their stupefaction, 
and recognized the altered circumstances to each 
other and the outer world under which they were 
placed, wasp-like, they set to work; and the two 
swarms, having amalgamated, proceeded to make 
one establishment out of the ruins of the two old 
ones. Fortwo months they continued to work, shut 
up in the fern case, in a most pestiferous atmosphere, 
and fed only on brown sugar. When the mass or 
mess was sent me, the yellow nest seemed to have 
been deserted. The comb of this was all nibbled 
away, and the materials had been used to patch and 
extend the brown nest withal. The new paper was 
somewhat glutinous, and smoother than ordinary 
wasp-paper, probably in connection with the unnatural 
state in which the wasps had lived. And it was not 
laid down on the usual plan of the species, in prettily 
varied shelly patches, but in one large sticky-looking 
sheet, streaked with undulating lines, and coloured 
irregularly from the indiscriminate use of the light or 
dark material. 
But, however the substance may differ, it is made 
up, or manipulated, if I may transfer this expression, 
by all the species alike in the same way. To acertain 
extent the cohesion of the particles is mechanical ; 
for a kind of felting or interlacing of the fibres may 
be traced in the paper of some nests. But the mate- 
rials are for the most part held together by the 
