74 INSECT ARCHITECTURE. 



to find out the secret. At length, however, his per- 

 severance was rewarded. He remarked a lemale 

 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 continued to add, when 

 he caught her, in order to examine the nature of her 

 bundle ; and he found that it was not yet moistened 

 nor rolled into a ball, as is always done before em- 

 ploying it in building. In every other respect it 

 had precisely the same colour and fibrous texture 

 as the walls of a vespiary. Ft struck him as remark- 

 able 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 detaching 

 the fibres, she bruised them (les charpissoit) into a 

 sort of lint (charpie) with her mandibles. 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 frequently seen wasps em- 

 ployed 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 



