\ Zaz NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
and they make no angry attempts to recover it. 
The distinction of mewm and tuum has no place ina 
wasp’s feelings, any farther then her mandibles can 
reach. Right and might are to her exactly the same 
thing, and she who has lost is just as if she had 
never possessed.* Their common nest only ex- 
cepted. 
Wasps’ nests are not free from intruders; snails, 
and the larve of different insects, are sometimes 
found in them. As far as circumstances will allow 
they are kept scrupulously clean; the tree-nests 
most particularly so. The excretions are discharged 
outside the nest; all the dead grubs, and all rejected 
fragments of food, are carried away to a distance. 
The refuse of a nest of V. germanica, which I kept 
in a glass case for many weeks, was always removed 
in this manner, and the grubs were usually stuck up 
on the panes, at the extreme boundaries of their 
range, as it were, by the workers. In the same way 
ground-wasps remove to a distance all they can of 
the earth and stones which they excavate from their 
dens. The limits to what they carry away are of 
course very narrow, as they can only support a very 
little weight in the air, though they can drag large 
and heavy bodies along the ground. Probably, it 
is the smooth, polished margin of the hole which 
betrays the wasps’ nest beneath, the grains of earth 
and fragments of insects are generally too widely 
scattered to give any clue to the position either of 
* Hunter, Op. cit. p. 426, gives bees the same good character, they 
are not covetous or disposed to obstruct others, but what they have 
collected they defend. 
