154 
NATURE NOTES 
522. A Plucky Wasp. — On inspecting one of my nesting boxes at the 
beginning oT May I found a Blue Tit lying dead upon her eggs. After clearing 
the box I replaced it in position. Ten days after this a second Blue Tits’ nest 
was half built and a queen wasp was on the inside of the lid. Thinking her an 
undesirable intruder, I was on the point of taking her life, when I noticed that 
she, too, was making a nest, and was not the common wasp, being, probably 
(I have no book of reference by me), Vespa sylvestris. A week later the tits had 
completed their nest and the wasp was busy building an ash-coloured paper 
house, which hung by a single stalk from the lid inside the box and was about 
the size of an ordinary peach, with a small opening at the lower end, an inch and 
a half from the builders of the other nest. At last, not liking the look of things, 
and the increasing size of the building overhead, the tits quitted the scene without 
laying any eggs. The wasp is still at work and external layers of paper are being 
added to the structure. It seems rather unenterprising of the tits not to slay her 
outright, for tits are credited with taking bees, so why not wasps? Perseverance 
and pluck have won the day. 
South-acre, Swaffham. Edmund Thos. Daubeny. 
523. Spider. — Strolling through a beautiful garden in this neighbourhood 
last week filled to overflowing with flowers and plants of every description, and 
many of them rare and foreign, I suddenly discovered on my coat a wonderful 
yellow insect. On looking more closely at it on the palm of my hand, I saw it 
was a spider. It was a pure chrome-yellow, body, legs and head, only the eyes 
were crimson. The body was very fat, and about as large as a full-sized dried 
pea, the legs rather short. It was a beautiful specimen, and quite rare I should 
say. Will some of your readers who are learned in spiders kindly give me their 
ideas on this note ? 
It is possible, I suppose, that eggs are in the foreign roots sometimes and do 
hatch in this country, and that this spider may have been a foreigner. 
Haslemere. E. A. Bedford. 
July I, 1907. 
[Was not the spider Misumetia vatia? See Nature Notes for 1901, pp. 
198, 218.— Ed. N.Sr.} 
524. What is a Perennial? — Having, by your kind permission, raised 
the botanical question as to what is a compound umbel, will you also allow me 
to ask when a plant should be called “perennial”? Ought not a plant, to 
be perennial, to come up year after year from identically the same root-stock, and 
not from a totally different part of an underground runner, or an overground 
one, which sends up fresh stems every year ? If the plant is bulbous, ought it 
not, to be perennial, to come up year after year from identically the same bulb, 
as in the case of the white lily, and not from an adjoining bulb, or tuber, 
which has been shot out from last year’s bulb or tuber, as in the case of 
the orchis? I find orchids described in botanical works as perennial, although 
they grow from a fresh tuber every year. It hardly seems reasonable that they 
should be placed in the same category as plants that grow from identically the 
same tuber or bulb year after year. By the bye, why will people keep calling an 
orchis “ an orchid ” ? Does the designation “perennial” merely mean that the 
plant has some other w.ay of propagating itself beside the propagation by 
means of seed? The term “biennial” applied to plants is a very misleading 
one, for every biennial is an annual or a perennial if allowed to sow itself in a 
natural way, that is, in the autumn. Every biennial will be an annual for the 
first year, if left to Nature. Every biennial throws out root-leaves in the summer 
or autumn, it makes no further progress that year, and then during next spring 
and summer it throws up the flower-stem and produces seed again, all within 
twelve months from the last seeding ot the plant. If the bulbous root-stock of 
the common white lily is allowed to remain in the ground it throws out root- 
leaves in the autumn, and afterwards flowers in the following summer every year ; 
but if the bulb is taken out of the ground when the flower-stem dies down in the 
early autumn before the root-leaves are produced and is not replanted until the 
spring, then the plant is delayed for one year and becomes biennial, for then it 
has to throw out its root-leaves first and to wait all the following winter before 
