48 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



obvious loss of ripe peaches and grapes, as well as 

 of dignity, when one has to duck and dodge to avoid 

 the buzzing menace." 



THE FOUNDATION OF AN INSECT CITY. 



Yet the life of the queen wasp is so admirable as 

 an example of self-sacrifice and devotion to the good 

 of the race that one cannot help regretting that our 

 interests clash so fatally. Since the lingering rays of 

 autumn sunlight glinted upon her armour of gold and 

 black, as she buried her jaws deep in the honeyed 

 recesses of the ivy bloom, she has slept in some dusty 

 crevice, amid cobwebs and woodlice, and now she 

 buzzes abroad, seeking a sheltered spot where she 

 can dig the foundations of the city that is to be. 

 Unaided, she drags out grains of earth and stones, 

 till she has tunnelled a secret cave, from whose roof 

 she builds downwards a cluster of hanging cubicles 

 of papier-mack^, manufactured by her own royal jaws. 

 In each she lays an egg of a "worker," or neuter 

 female being able to discriminate, as necessity arises, 

 between the sexes of the eggs that she will lay. The 

 grubs from these eggs she feeds with care until they 

 become mature wasps her own handmaidens who 

 set to work enlarging the cave, and filling it at the 

 same time with more paper cubicles, hanging tier 

 from tier, and the whole surrounded with quintuple 

 defence of paper walls. In the new cubicles the 

 queen wasp now lays eggs, both male and female, 

 in due proportion, and when this second brood reaches 

 maturity multiplication quickens a hundredfold, so 



