1931 ] Nest-Building Habits of Polistes rubiginosus 131 
to make happy the heart of any seclusion-loving creature. 
Here it was that, on opening the door on October 13, 1928, 
I was delighted to find a colony of these wasps. The nest 
was large, with all of the cells empty, and occupied by 
about fifty fine adults, which I supposed were queens. This 
was my opportunity to learn something of their habits of 
hibernation, and the founding of new colonies the next 
spring. I have already shown 2 that in P. annularis the 
queens hibernate some distance away from the nest, but 
on warm, sunny days of winter they often return to the 
old homestead, and when they make ready to found their 
own colonies, they do so in the vicinity of their former 
home, often with several queens co-operating in construct- 
ing one nest, and occasionally biting out the cell walls of 
their old nest for building materials for the new. 
These, then, were the problems which I wished to solve 
for rubiginosis : 
(a) Will these queens hibernate on the nest all winter, 
or will they disseminate? 
(b) Will they revisit the old home during the warm days 
of winter? 
(c) When they do build in the spring, will they choose 
nesting-sites near to the one where they were born? 
Occasional visits to the shed yielded the following data 
in answer to the above questions : 
On October 13, fifty queens were on the nest; on Octo- 
ber 27, forty were there; on November 4, ten remained, 
and on December 3, three were on the wall near the site, 
the nest having fallen to the floor. A careful search 
through the five similar buildings nearby revealed none on 
these dates. This shows that they do not hibernate on 
the nest, but wander elsewhere ; that they do not leave the 
nest in a body or swarm, and that some cling to the nest 
more tenaciously, literally and figuratively speaking, than 
do others. But the fact that they do not leave in a body 
does not mean that they do not hibernate gregariously, for 
2 Annals Ent. Soc. Amer. 23: 461-466, 1930. 
