214 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
tric lines, and a little hole m the middle marks the 
spot through which the last artificer withdrew her 
mandible when she put the finishing touch to her 
work. 
I am writing with a singularly clean and beautiful 
specimen of the work of this wasp before me, which 
was taken from a cottage rafter at Warbleton. But 
this is quite an exceptional specimen, for the cases 
of all the other nests of V. germanica which I have 
seen dug out of the ground are most uninviting : 
they are rugged, dirty, without any attempt at 
arrangement of the work; and the dull grey hue of 
the paper, instead of being relieved by white lines, is 
generally made still deeper and duller by earthy 
soils and stains. The combs are not made so rigidly 
straight as those of V. vulgaris, but they are not 
curved as gracefully as those of the tree-wasps. 
V. rufa (Plate X.), though a ground-wasp, builds 
her nest on the laminar, not on the cellular plan. 
But the structure has characters of its own, by which 
it may readily be distinguished from the tree nests 
which are built in this way. The successive layers 
are not perfectly free from each other, but tacked 
down here and there at the edges. And these edges 
are very numerous, marking the whole surface with 
frequent ridges, like the lines of sheep-tracks on a 
Down hill-side seen from a distance. I have only one 
specimen of this kind of nest, for which I am indebted 
to the kindness of Mr. F. Smith. This is in the form 
of a flattened sphere, pressed in equally at the top 
and bottom, though not quite to such an extent as 
the nest of V. germanica. The entrance is lateral, 
