130 
Psyche 
[ December 
behind the walls of old wooden buildings where they find 
ingress and egress through a tiny crack or knot-hole 
(Figs. 1 and 5) some distance from the actual site of the 
nest. 
Under these conditions, I was indeed fortunate in finding 
a nest of ruhiginosis unusually low so I could make ob- 
servations on their behavior. Since these wasps prefer 
dark, inaccessible places, the queen which began this one 
Fig. 1. 
found an ideal spot here. The little shanty was one of a 
half-dozen huts which had been built for the storing of 
ammunition during the war. They stood in a large woods 
about seven miles from the city, but now were unused 
and abandoned. This was a sheet-metal structure among 
half a dozen wooden ones in a row, all windowless and dark, 
with only a small opening near the top of each for ventila- 
tion. With the door closed, the place was dark enough 
