How Animals Work. 



The season has now far advanced, and the wasps, 

 as if aware of the approach of autumn, begin to form 

 tiers the cells of which are of much larger dimensions, 

 and are destined to be the nurseries in which perfect 

 male and female wasps will be reared. By the time 

 these fully developed males and females have com- 

 pleted their transformations summer has practically 

 passed, and they very shortly leave the nest, to which 

 they will never return, for none of the males survive 

 their brief wedlock for more than a few hours. A large 

 proportion of the fertilized queens perish with the first 

 frosts of autumn, only the comparatively few lucky 

 surviving queens creeping into warm, sheltered nooks, 

 where they will remain dormant in the profound sleep 

 of hibernation throughout the winter, awakening with 

 the return of spring, each to become the foundress of 

 a new nest. As soon as the perfect males and females 

 are reared, then the worker wasps, who have laboured 

 so indefatigably throughout the summer in the con- 

 struction of this wonderful nest and in the rearing of 

 its teeming inhabitants, cease their toiling, and instead 

 of continuing to feed and tend with unremitting care 

 the remaining larvae, seize upon them, drag them from 

 the cells, bear them far afield, and there abandon them 

 to a quick death by exposure, or perhaps to be pounced 

 upon by some hungry bird. In this way during the 

 first chill days of autumn the entire population desert 

 the nest and perish. 



The Wood or Bush Wasp is a little smaller than 

 the Common Wasp, and instead of excavating a chamber 

 in the soil, hangs its nest from the branches of some 

 woodland tree or bush, or sometimes under the project- 



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