i66 BEE-FARMING. 



all-trades the wheelwright, I have seen at various times 

 scores of wasps busily engaged taking away the wood to 

 form their nests. For two years, the bark not being re- 

 moved from the wood, they actually made holes in the 

 barkj then from an excavation beneath secured the object 

 of their toil. But with all my watching I have never 

 seen a single wood-wasp working on the ash stile ; but I 

 have observed one or two actively employed on an old 

 sycamore tree, and on one occasion I caught one on a 

 bench made from birch-wood. In the Journal of a 

 Naturalist it is said they procure their material from the 

 willow and on an allied species, the sallow ; I have, how- 

 ever, not been so fortunate as to find them on this wood, 

 although we have plenty of it exposed and decaying about 

 the village. Whatever kind of wood is laboriously scraped 

 together by these insects, it is doubtless some soft white 

 wood, and it is afterwards cemented with what has been 

 named animal glue, but wood alone is not used; withered 

 leaves, fibres of plants, the down from the willow catkin, 

 as well as downy hairs from many leafy buds, are made use 

 of by these active paper-manufacturers. 



Wasps abound most in woody, wild districts. I have 

 noticed in one wild woodland in Cheshire that wasps 

 abound in such prodigious quantities that the peasantry 

 have frequently informed me they cannot from this cause 

 keep bees. One cottager in particular had four large 

 colonies of bees in his garden last summer, strong enough, 

 I thought, to resist any foe; however, every stock v/as 

 destroyed in the autumn by wasps. In another district, 

 about five miles from the above, not woody, but highly 

 cultivated, it is almost a novelty to find a wasp's nest. 



There are six distinct species of wasp in the British 

 Islands, seven if we include the hornet, which, after all, is 

 a wasp of a larger size, and all the species manufacture 

 paper for their homes, although some use coarser materials 



