"Tell us, sir," the children cried, "about the wasps while dinner is cooking."
So Ben Gile, who had left the cooking to the other guides, gathered the children and Mrs. Reece about him, and began: "One day last fall I saw, high up in a tree near the pond, the pretty, gray nest of Mrs. Vespa-Wasp. It did not look like a real house, with windows in it and steps leading up to it. But there it hung, swinging in the bare branches, its walls of pretty, soft gray blending so beautifully with the pale-blue sky.
"I wondered whether any of the wasp family was at home, but the house was too high for me to reach, so I went away to find a long pole with which to knock. With my long pole I knocked gently at first, then louder and louder, but no one stirred within. So I poked harder, trying to break off a strong branch which ran straight through the top of the house. At last it broke off, and down came the gray house almost into my arms.
"It was big and round, like a Japanese lantern. Guess of what it was made? Just paper. But not our kind of paper; it was wasp-paper. Mrs. Vespa and her family make this paper out of wood-pulp, which they get by scraping off the weathered wood from trees and fences. Of course this old wood is of various colors, but that makes the house so much the prettier. One wasp comes back with its burden of woody pulp rolled up in a little pellet. This it takes and spreads in thin ribbons along the edge of the wall which is being made. Perhaps this edge is dark gray. Then off it flies for more material, while another takes its place with a pellet of light gray, which is soon skilfully moulded on to the edge. Sometimes the outer wall consists of several layers of this wasp-paper, which is strong and waterproof. Within the wall are many stories of cone, built like different floors in our own houses.
"Early in the spring Mrs. Vespa-Wasp, who has been passing the cold winter days tucked away in a warm crevice somewhere, comes out and finds a site for her summer home. She begins this as a very small and simple one, starting with just a few rooms fastened to the branch of a tree. Here she lays an egg in each little room, then brings in food for the new baby wasps which are in the making. The kind of food which is stored away depends upon the kind of wasps. Some like beetles, some spiders, some caterpillars, and others grasshoppers and cicadas.
"As in the bee family, the first children are all workers, because Mrs. Vespa-Wasp needs assistance in building up the home and feeding the children. This first home is small, not nearly large enough for the growing family, so new rooms must be built at once. These are added on to the first ones until there is a good-sized layer of them. If Mrs. Wasp should go on making this upper story larger and larger, it would be buffeted about by the wind and rain, and perhaps broken. So the family starts a second story under the first. On the under side of the top floor some of the cells are broken away and a stem is made to start the next floor, and so on, until there are four or five combs in the house. They are always building the house over, tearing down the walls to make room for new floors; but this does not make the house unsafe in the mean time, as the walls are not connected with the floors, but form a loose envelope about them.
"Later in the season, after the family has become very large, some of the upper cells are torn out, making a nice, warm attic, where the family may go to keep out of the wind and rain. They dislike the cold and wet very much.
"I carried this big house to my cabin with me, so that I might look it over and see just how it was arranged. Very carefully I cut away a little of the outer wall until I had a place large enough to look through. Guess what I saw lying cuddled down in many of these rooms? Little, soft, white baby wasps. When the Vespa family are grown up they are called hornets, and Peter and Tom know how hornets sting! I was not afraid of the babies, but was not sure that all the old wasps were out. It was a cold day, and wasps get stiff very quickly, so I watched carefully to see whether the warm air of the room would not limber up some stiff joints which were perhaps in hiding up-stairs in the house. Sure enough, in a few moments out crawled a worker, looking quite dazed and sheepish at the change in temperature. I did not wait for it to become thoroughly awake, but picked it up with the forceps and put it out of the window. I was kept busy, for twenty-five old fellows walked out, thinking, no doubt, that they had made a mistake in the season, and that it was not time, after all, for them to die. All the wasp family, except the queens, expect to die, and do die in the autumn.
"I could not find either flies or spiders for the babies, and even if there had been a few about I could not have used them, as there was no worker wasp to chew them soft and fine for them. So I made a nice, appetizing syrup of sugar and water, and found that young wasps were as eager for sweets as little children are. They worked their baby mouths busily as long as I had the patience to feed them. When the Vespa family are grown up they eat honey dew from the little aphids, fruit juice, and the nectar from flowers, or, if fortune favors them, they may gain entrance to Mrs. Honey-Bee's home, and feast from her well-filled honeycombs. But the babies all eat insects which their mothers put in the little rooms beside the eggs.
"Mrs. Polistes is a cousin of Mrs. Vespa. She is long and slender, while Mrs. Vespa is rather broad. Her house is a much simpler affair. It has just one layer of rooms suspended by a stem from the under side of a porch, or maybe the eaves, of a house."