132 
Psyche 
[December 
during the previous year in January, I discovered about a 
hundred queens of this species huddled together in the gal- 
leries of the carpenter ant in a fallen tree. They were 
grouped in three masses, and when taken into the labora- 
tory would often come out of the log when the room was 
warm, but would always huddle together in the galleries 
when the room became cold. 
I cannot say with certainty whether they return on warm 
days to the old home, thereby refreshing their memories of 
the site. I was unable to visit the place during the winter 
as often as I intended: however, on three visits on very 
warm days in February no wasps were present. 
Fortunately, we have a more positive reply to the ques- 
tion whether the queens build their new nests near the 
place where they were born, after having spent the winter 
elsewhere in hibernation. Likewise the question, does more 
than one queen work together on a nest, is answered in 
the affirmative, as the following data will show regarding 
these two points. 
My next visit to the row of sheds was on June 8. There 
I found in the little house a new nest, just a few feet from 
the site of the old one. As mentioned before, the old one 
had fallen during the early winter, and I had left it on 
the floor, but it had been carried away during the winter. 
Hence the nest itself could hardly have been the object 
which they remembered or which attracted them, but the 
little building itself. This new nest was hexagonal, with 
148 cells, only 8 of which were capped; the rest were 
shallow and filled with eggs and larvae of various sizes. 
There were no full-sized empty cells from which adults 
could have emerged; in spite of this, however, seventeen 
adults were on the nest. These, then, were undoubtedly 
the queens which had emerged the previous autumn. 
Of course, when one finds more than one queen on the 
nest, one suspects that the surplus queens sink into the 
insignificant role of workers, while only one rules the nest 
in royal fashion. Whether or not this happens has yet to 
be ascertained, but here with so large a nest so early in 
the year, it is quite probable that all the queens had shared 
