Life Insurance for Wasps 



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ready to be eaten by the young one that will 

 develop from the egg, and which must spend a 

 considerable time in the confinement of its nurs- 

 ery before it has grown big enough to go 

 abroad. This custom involves some of the most 

 ingenious arrangements and most wonderful in- 

 stincts in the whole range of life. 



For example: Last August I found in the 

 edge of the woods an old pail, on the inside of 

 which were plastered structures of dried mud 

 which looked as if they had been made by braid- 

 ing clay cords into miniature imitations of half- 

 round drain tiles. Each was as broad as my 

 finger, with walls rather less than a sixteenth 

 of an inch in thickness, and there were five 

 or six side by side, the longest measuring some 

 six inches, and containing five compartments 

 of equal length, separated by thick cross-parti- 

 tions of clay. 



These were the safety-deposit vaults of a 

 large black mother-wasp, in which she had left 

 her treasures for the use of an assignee yet un- 

 born. I recognized them because I had been 

 watching for a fortnight a similar mud-wasp 



