NEST OF BLACK WASP 99 



It must be understood the foregoing description applies to 

 the original style of native house, as unaffected by modern 

 innovations. In the capital and the more important places, as 

 well as in many villages, numbers of brick houses, with upper 

 storeys and three or four or more rooms, have been built of late 

 years ; and hundreds of six-roomed houses, with verandahs 

 carried on brick pillars, have also been erected, following a 

 model introduced about the year 1870 by the late Rev. J. 

 Pearse. This struck the fancy of the well-to-do people, and 

 similar ones have been built all over the central provinces. 



Few people who have lived in Madagascar can have failed to 

 notice a small longish lump of light coloured clay stuck under 

 the eaves of the house, or on the side of a window, or, in fact, 

 in any sheltered place ; and if we take the trouble to break off 

 a piece, we find that this lump of clay contains a number of 

 cells, all filled with caterpillars or spiders in a numbed and semi- 

 lifeless condition. The maker of these cells is a black wasp 

 about an inch long, with russet wings, and as one sits in the 

 verandah of one's house one may often hear a shrill buzz 

 somewhere up in the rafters, and there the little worker is busy 

 bringing in pellets of clay with which she builds up the walls of 

 the cell. (When I lived at Ambohimanga, one of these wasps 

 made a nest with several cells in my study, as the window was 

 generally open to the air.) Presently she is off again for 

 another load to the banks of a little stream where she has her 

 brick-field. Kneading the red earth with her mandibles, she 

 quickly forms it into a pellet of clay, about the size of a pea, 

 which she dexterously picks up and flies away back to the 

 verandah. This pellet is placed on the layer already laid, 

 carefully smoothed and " bonded in " with the previous 

 structure, until a cell is completed. Observations made by a 

 careful student of animal and insect life show that about 

 twenty-six journeys finish one cell, and that on a fine day it 

 takes about forty-five minutes to complete it. This is only 

 one out of many cells, however, placed on the top of each 

 other. 



With regard to the storing of these cells with food for the 

 grubs of the wasp, Mr Cory 1 found that the number of spiders 

 enclosed in eleven cells varied from eight to nineteen. These 

 are caught by the wasp, stung so as to be insensible, but not 



