THE ZOOLOGIST. 



there w^ two eggs. The eggs were attached to the sides of the 

 chHc-^ <,v^ _ ^a those cases where there were two to one cell they 

 were attached on opposite sides. In the third and fourth combs 

 I noticed there were two eggs to about every fifth cell. Was 

 this due to an insufficiency of cells for the queen to lay in ? 

 Certainly there were no empty ones, and I could only suppose 

 that the workers could not build them quickly enough for her 

 needs. 



I had either put in too much smoke or else the wasps got 

 hurt in the digging out, at any rate they crawled about feebly, 

 and though, after I had transferred them to the box, I spent 

 nearly an hour fanning them, by the end of the morning they 

 had all died, so I was left with a nest containing (I estimate it 

 roughly) some six hundred or seven hundred eggs, larv^, and 

 pupse. I found to my surprise that the larvae were quite easy to 

 feed, rearing themselves out of their cells as I held the comb in 

 my hand to suck up the honey from my finger-tips. Though 

 the size of their head was no larger than the head of an ordinary 

 pin, they worked their jaws with such vigour that I could feel 

 the pressure against my finger-tips. Concluding that honey 

 alone was not sufficiently nourishing for them and they would 

 also require some food containing a nitrogenous compound, I 

 extracted one from its cell, killed it, and cut it up into fragments, 

 which I then distributed with a pair of pincers among the others. 

 They ate it with avidity ! It was really wonderful to see the 

 way they managed to manipulate the morsel with their jaws and 

 the rapidity with which it disappeared. I decided it would be 

 impossible to rear the whole nest, so I extracted and threw away 

 some two hundred larvae, leaving about two hundred distri- 

 buted between the three combs — the fourth comb contained 

 eggs only. 



In the evening, four wasps broke through their pupte- 

 eases. They appeared rather shaky at first, took a little 

 honey from my hand, and spent the rest of the time wander- 

 ing about the combs and poking their heads into the cells. I 

 now removed one of the combs so as to still further lessen 

 the number of larvae to be fed. Before I went to bed one 

 more wasp had bitten its way out of the pupa-case, making a 

 total of five. 



