Insect architecture / [Anon].

  • James Rennie
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insect architecture / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to find out the secret. At length, however, his per- severance was rewarded. He remarked a female wasp alight on the sash of his window, and begin to gnaw the wood with her mandibles; and it struck building. He saw her detach from the wood a and finer than a-hair; and as she did not swallow these, but gathered them into a mass with her feet, he could not doubt that his first idea was correct. In a short time she shifted to another part of the window-frame, carrying with her the fibres she ‘had collected, and to which she continued to add, when he caught her, in order to examine the nature of her bundle; and he found that it was not yet moistened nor rolled into a ball, as is always done before em- ploying it in building. In every other respect it had precisely the same colour and fibrous texture as the walls of a vespiary. It struck him as remark- able that it bore no resemblance to wood gnawed which is granular lke sawdust. This would not have suited the design of the wasp, who was well aware that fibres of some length form a stronger texture. He even discovered, that before detaching the fibres, she bruised them (les charpissott) into a sort of lint (charpie) with her mandibles. All this the careful naturalist imitated by bruising and paring the same wood of the window-sash with his pen-knife, till ‘he succeeded in making a little bundle of fibres scarcely to be distinguished from that collected by the wasp. .- 7 at) We have ourselves frequently seen wasps em- ployed in procuring their materials in this manner, and have always observed that they shift from one part to another more than once in preparing a single load,—a circumstance which we ascribe entirely to
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