“I don’t understand it at all,” said the friend. “Everything is exactly as it was when we went to sleep, except that the nest has fallen.”
“I was dreaming as I hung on the nest last night,” replied Mrs. Polistes, “when suddenly I felt a great jar and was knocked off.”
“So was I,” exclaimed her friend.
“I flew around in the dark until I found it again,” added Mrs. Polistes, “but I had to wait until daylight to see what had happened. Oh, dear! It is so upsetting to find one’s home upside down, and two of my children are just ready to spin their cocoons.”
“Your children?” asked her friends quite sharply, for it made her cross to have such misfortunes. “Your children? One of those children is mine.”
“Which one?” asked Mrs. Polistes, who thought she remembered her own egg-laying.
“I don’t know which, now that the nest is all turned around,” was the answer. “It has mixed those babies up, and I can’t pick out mine.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” said Mrs. Polistes kindly. “You may call them both yours, if you want to. Just laying the egg doesn’t count for much, and we have both fed and cared for them. I supposed we would share babies as we have shared everything else.”
This made the friend ashamed of herself, and she said that she was sorry she was cross, and that Mrs. Polistes should call one of the cocoons hers.
Then they put their heads together to decide what to do with the nest. When Wasps put their heads together, they stroke each other with their long feelers, or antennæ, and in that way each is sure what the other is thinking. They also smell with these feelers, you know, and some people say that they hear with them. A Wasp with broken antennæ can do but little, and as for not having any—why, a Wasp might as well die at once as to lose his antennæ.