38 Next to the Ground 



seemed to him as mechanical as they were 

 fretful. Then too, when a nest got populous 

 the drip underneath it was not good to smell. 

 It dried upon the floor or the wind-beams or 

 whatever caught it, in whitey-gray splotches 

 fine and thin as mist, but with something of 

 the same pungently acrid odor that came from 

 a ball of fighting wasps. Still he wondered 

 where the red wasps came from — in early 

 spring they were so very few, and by late sum- 

 mer so very many. Nests that ended broader 

 than the two hands began with no more than 

 half a dozen roundish cells set on, rosette fash- 

 ion, at the end of a stout pillar of wood-pulp 

 paper, anchored to and pendant from some 

 sheltered surface. 



Joe did not know that fertile red-wasp 

 queens live through the winter, sleeping away 

 the cold in snug cracks or caves or cellars or 

 barns. Very early in spring these hibernating 

 queens creep out, feed a bit, then set them- 

 selves to nest-making. The pillar and first 

 cells are the sole work of the swarm-mother. 

 When she has possibly half a dozen cells she 

 lays eggs in each, which very soon hatch into 

 tiny grubs. These the queen feeds and tends, 

 distilling for them within herself a sort of 

 brownish liquid, from honey and the juice of 

 insects. In twenty days or thereabouts the 

 early grubs come out strong young worker- 



