246 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
will show. A sip of water here, a scraping of wood 
or grass there, as the passing opportunity may offer ; 
as busy, but not so fussy, as bees, these wasps are 
engaged actively in social duties, while they seem to 
be merely amusing themselves like flies. Once laden, 
inside or out, they fly straight home, and near the 
nest no stragglers areto be found. They go straight 
in or out, and do not haunt the immediate neighbour- 
hood of their home. From several nests which have 
worked in my windows on different occasions I 
never found but one straggler within doors, and she 
had evidently lost her way, and had come in from the 
other side of the house. 
The same fate, however, awaits them all, idle and 
industrious alike. A few rainy days and.cold nights, 
and it is all over with them. With great care, keep- 
ing them warm and clean and well fed, and exposing 
them to the sun as tenderly as a cottager does her 
auriculas, once I managed to keep a swarm of V. 
germanica alive to the end of January; but they all 
died at last.* The age to which bees, and particu- 
larly queen-bees, may atta has been very variously 
stated,t but the limits of a wasp’s life are precisely 
known. The workers and drones, with every care, 
will not survive the winter, and the length of the 
queen’s life does not exceed a summer and a half 
under ordinary circumstances. Though, should any- 
thing have prevented the queen from building her 
nest and laying eggs, there is reason to believe, as 
* Zoologist, Vol. XVII, p. 6655, 1859. ‘ Contributions to the 
Natural History of the British Vespide.’ 
+ This subject is discussed at length by Mr. Desborough. ‘ Ento- 
mological Transactions.’ Vol. Il, New Series, p. 145. 1852-3. 
