
226 
KIDD’S OWN JOURNAL. 

this gallery leads, and which, when completed, is 
from one to two feet in diameter, the mother-wasp 
lays the foundations of her city—beginning with 
the walls. 
The building materials employed by wasps | 
were long a matter of conjecture to scientific in- 
quirers ; for the blueish-grey, papery substance of 
the whole structure, has no resemblance to any 
sort of wax employed by bees for a similar 
purpose. Now that the discovery has been made, 
we can with difficulty bring ourselves to believe 
that a naturalist so acute and indefatigable as M. 
Reaumur, should have, for twenty years, as he 
tells us, endeavored, without success, to find out 
the secret. At length, however, his perseverance 
was rewarded. He remarked a female wasp 
alight on the sash of his window, and begin to 
gnaw the wood with her mandibles; and it struck 
him at once that she was procuring materials for 
building. He saw her detach from the wood a 
bundle of fibres, about a tenth of an inch in length, 
and finer than a hair; and as she did not swallow 
these, but gathered them into a mass with her 
feet, he could not doubt that his first idea was 
correct. In a short time, she shifted to another 
part of the window-frame ; carrying with her the 
fibres she had collected, and to which she con- 
tinued to add; when he caught her, in order to 
examiue the nature of her bundle. He then found 
that it was not yet moistened nor rolled into a 
ball, as is always done before employing it in 
building. In every other respect it had precisely 
the same color and fibrous texture as the walls of 
a vespiary. It struck him as remarkable, that it 
bore no resemblance to wood gnawed by other 
insects, such as the goat-moth caterpillar, which 
is granular like sawdust. This would not have 
suited the design of the wasp, who was well 
aware that fibres of some length form a stronger 
texture. He even discovered that, before de- 
taching the fibres, she bruised them (les charpis- 
soit) into a sort of lint (charpie) with her man- 
dibles. All this, the careful naturalist imitated 
by bruising and paring the same wood of the 
window-sash with his pen-knife, till he succeeded 
in making a little bundle of fibres, scarcely to be 
distinguished from that collected by the wasp. 
We have ourselves, says J. Rennie, frequently 
seen wasps eniployed in procuring their materials 
in this manner, and have always observed that 
they shift from one part to another more than 
once, in preparing a single load—a circumstance 
which we ascribe entirely to the restless temper 
peculiar to the whole order of hymenopterous 
insects. Reaumur found that the wood which 
they preferred was such as had been long exposed 
to the weather. and is old and dry. White, of 
Selborne, and Kirby and Spence, on the contrary, 
maintain that wasps obtain their paper from 
sound timber—hornets only from that which is 
decayed. Our own observations, however, confirm 
the statement of Reaumur with respect to wasps, 
as, in every instance which has fallen under our 
notice, the wood selected was very much 
weathered ; and in one case, an old oak post in 
a garden at Lee, in Kent, half destroyed by 
dry-rot, was seemingly the resort of all the wasps 
in the vicinity. In another case, the deal bond 
in a brick wall, which had been built thirt 
years, is at this moment (June, 1829) literally 



striped with the gnawings of wasps, which we 
have watched at the work for hours together. 
The bundles of ligneous fibres thus detached, 
are moistened before being used, with a glutinous 
liquid, which causes them to adhere together ; 
they are then kneaded into a sort of paste, or 
papier maché. Having prepared some of this 
material, the mother-wasp begins first to line 
with it the roof of her chamber ; for wasps always 
build downwards. The round bail of fibres which 
she has previously kneaded up with glue, she 
now forms into a leaf—walking backwards, and 
spreading it out with her mandibles, her tongue, 
and her feet, till it is as thin almost as tissue 
paper. 
One sheet, however, of such paper as this, 
would form but a fragile ceiling; quite insufficient 
to prevent the earth falling down into the nest. 
The wasp, accordingly, is not satisfied with her 
work till she has spread fifteen or sixteen layers 
one above the other, rendering the wall altogether 
nearly two inches thick. The several layers are 
not placed in contact, like the layers of a piece 
of pasteboard ; but with small intervals or open 
spaces between, appearing somewhat like a grotto 
built with bivalve shells, particularly when looked 
at on the outside. This is probably caused by 
the insect working in a curvilinear manner. 
Having finished the ceiling, she next begins 

to build the first terrace of her city, which, 
under its protection, she suspends horizontally ; 
and not, like the combs in a bee-hive, in a per- 
pendicular position. The suspension of which 
we speak is also light and elegant, compared 
with the more heavy union of the hive-bee’s 
combs. It is, in fact, a hanging floor; immove- 
ably secured by rods of similar materials with 
the roof, but rather stronger. From twelve to 
thirty of these rods, about an inch or less in 
length, and a quarter of an inch in diameter, 
are constructed for the suspension of the terrace. 
They are elegant in form ; being made gradually 
narrower towards the middle, and widening at 
each end—in order, no doubt, to render their 
hold the stronger. 
The terrace itself is circular, and composed 
of an immense number of cells, formed of the paper 
already described, and of almost the same size and 
form as those of a honeycomb; each being a perfect 
hexagon, mathematically exact, and every hair’s 
breadth of the space completely filled. These 
cells, however, are not used as honey-pots by 
wasps, as they are by bees; for wasps, certain 
foreign species excepted, make no honey, ‘and the 
cells are wholly appropriated to the rearing of their 
young. Like other hymenopterous insects, the 
grubs are placed with their heads downwards; 
and the openings of the cells are also downwards ; 
while their united bottoms form a nearly uniform 
level upon which the inhabitants of the nest may 
walk. We have seen, whilst examining the economy 
of the carder-bee, that when a young bee had 
escaped from its cradle-cell, and so rendered it 
empty, that cell was subsequently appropriated to 
the storing of honey. But in the case of wasps, 
a cell thus evacuated is immediately cleaned out 
and repaired for the reception of another grub— 
an egg being laid in it by a female wasp as soon 
as it is ready. 
When the foundress wasp has completed a 


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