140 
Psyche 
[December 
from the nest, the chewing of paper pulp by the angry 
wasps sounded like the gnawing of a mouse in old papers. 
They were indeed as busy as they were angry, as they ener- 
getically poked their heads into the cells, as if in search 
for any that might remain. The larvse seemed more the 
object of their wrath than the nest itself. The larvse were 
always carried out and dropped at a great distance, while 
the bits of material were merely dropped below near by. 
Sometimes the larva was too heavy to permit a long flight ; 
then the wasp would fly to the ground with it, but always 
drag it one to four feet away before abandoning it. 
On June 30, a week later, they were still at the job; the 
nest was about two-thirds gone. Even two weeks later, 
July 14, a portion of the old nest still remained, with eight 
queens on board. They were unusually susceptible to in- 
trusion, and one marked with green singled me out for 
attack during my entire stay of an hour. She stung me 
once, and came back to renew her attacks as often as I 
chased her out. 
Perhaps their nervousness was increased by the fact that 
there was now a new nest also to be defended. On the 
ceiling, near the spot where the old nest had been, was the 
new nest with four of the queens on it. It was hexagonal 
in shape, and contained fifty-one cells, arranged in beauti- 
ful symmetry; the first row on one side had six cells, and 
the others in order contained 7, 8, 9, 8, 7 and 6 cells, re- 
spectively. Here they were at last doing what they prob- 
ably would have done at first, had not the presence of the 
old, broken nest near by disconcerted them. They rebuilt 
the nest near the old site, just as P. pallipe s and P. 
variatus had done elsewhere when their nests were re- 
moved. 
By July 28 I found a thriving nest of eighty-two cells, 
all shallow, of course, each containing an egg, and every 
cell but the four newest ones at the edge had round, shiny 
pellets of honey. The globules in the cells varied in size 
and number. My sense of taste told me that these were 
really thin nectar, and not the drops of water which these 
wasps bring in when the larvse are in an advanced stage 
or the cells are capped. Thus we find that this wasp pro- 
