142 
Psyche 
[December 
made a small, square room surrounding this hole. For 
three years, returning queens in the spring congregated 
in abundance about this opening. The second year another 
colony appeared up under the roof, and later others ap- 
peared in various parts of this old building, wherever a 
knot-hole or a crack was available. When finally the build- 
ing was wrecked, I found eight such nests between the 
lath and the outer wall. 
In two other distant localities in St. Louis County and 
Jefferson County the same condition prevailed and upon 
pulling off the boards which covered the nests I found in 
each several large combs which these wasps had built, one 
below another in true Vespa (not Polistes) fashion. In 
nest shown in fig. 2, each comb was attached to the one 
above by one or more pedicels, much after the manner of 
the comb attachment in nests of Vespa. 9 On the floor of this 
little square enclosure lay several old nests which had fallen 
of their own weight. Because of crowded conditions and 
the scarcity of proper dark nesting sites, these wasps had 
built tier below tier on the old nest ; they had not used the 
old soiled cells, but each time had built anew, just below. 
Another new departure in habit also was apparent here: 
they were salvaging and rechewing the paper in the old 
combs for material for the new ones, as can be plainly seen 
in the top three sections in fig. 2. This certainly seemed 
like an ingenious step in the direction of economy. It was 
interesting to note that in reducing these old nests to pulp, 
they used only the clean, soft cells, but did not attack the 
roofs ; these were extremely tough, and were contaminated 
by the many larvse that had grown in the cells. Moreover, 
if the roofs had been broken, the support of their nests 
would have been weakened. 
I say that the combs, attached one below the other, re- 
mind me of the nests of Vespa. It is easy to imagine this 
as the beginning of a new habit of nest building in rubigin- 
osis, or to conjecture that it is a revival of some ancestral 
habit. 
Vespa usually adds sheets of paper to enclose the 
A close-up of the same nest is shown in fig. 3. 
