1931 ] Nest-Building Habits of Polistes rubiginosus 133 
in the labor of its construction. Not all of the queens were 
on the nest when I arrived at 9 a.m. ; only eleven were 
there, but during the following three hours, six came in, 
some carrying materials and others left from time to time. 
Since all of these queens were given individual marks, I 
could make certain that the majority of them shared in the 
work. 
The adjacent building, made of wood, similar in struc- 
ture, equally dark and only two feet away, had contained 
no nest the previous year; now it harbored three nests of 
rubiginosis. One of these had four queens and 48 cells, 
another had two queens and 35 cells, and the third had 
one queen and 15 cells. The number of cells was only 
roughly in proportion to the number of queens per nest; 
the more queens, the more cells per nest. This, in turn, 
would mean, as one would expect, that all or most of the 
queens do work. However, it is evident that as the number 
of queens on the nest increases the work done by each 
individual is proportionally less. The nest with seventeen 
queens averaged nine cells per queen; the one with four 
queens averaged twelve cells each ; the one with two queens 
averaged seventeen cells, while the lone queen had made 
fifteen cells. An individual rubiginosis mother, even though 
of larger size than pallipes, builds no faster than many 
queens of the latter; this is shown by a comparison of the 
size of the nest of this species with that of pallipes. Six 
nests of the latter in nearby buildings with one mother 
each, had 15, 20, 14, 12, 10 and 7 cells on this same date. 
To summarize, then, we find that, like P. annularis of 
the tree-tops, this species remembered the old nesting-site 
and returned to it after hibernating elsewhere, and dissemi- 
nated from the place of their birth, but did not go very 
far from it to build their own nests. 3 One or more queens 
founded the new nest and shared in the work. The founders 
3 Hoffer (Clements and Long, Experimental Pollination, p. 248. 
1923) found that bumble bees remembered the place of their nest 
from the middle of October to April, when they returned. Also 
see article by Frison, Canad. Entom. 62: 51, 1930, who also finds that 
bumble bees remember the home site after spending the winter in 
hibernation. 
