in the drawing,* shows that some unusual influences had been at work. Instead of one comb, built of cells of uniform size, spreading regularly from the centre, there are five patches or tufts of cells of all sizes and of the most irregular construction. Mr. Stone,† who has described a similar appearance in the nest of another species, V. vulgaris, has suggested an explanation of it in the ill-directed efforts of a queenless swarm:-"The interior presented an appearance so unlike the interior of one over which a queen presides that I at once felt convinced no queen had ever set foot in it. No order or regularity was observed in the disposition of the combs; small ones, to the number of seven, were to be seen stuck about here and there on the face of the original one, from which they depended, while the cells were crowded with eggs or small larvæ, one cell containing as many as sixteen eggs, and but few less than five or six. The colony. consisted exclusively of workers, and they rather under than over the average size."

...

In Mr. Stone's specimen the greater part of the original nest had been destroyed, and with it the queen had perished. In mine the nest was not injured, but the queen seems to have been removed by her death, or by some accident. In either case it was the removal of the queen which lay at the bottom of the singular malformation of the comb. The swarm went on building irregularly without any fixed plan, till, in the absence of any common bond, they finally straggled away. There must have been plenty of

*Plate XIV.

+ 'Zoologist,' 1860, p. 7263.

young females in the nest, many of them probably impregnated; and their inability to supply the place of the queen-mother at once is particularly worthy of notice.

Here the swarm had thriven, and the nest had grown even beyond the ordinary dimensions of such structures. Another specimen in my cabinet takes up the story at a different point. For this I am indebted to Mr. Prince, of Uckfield. A gamekeeper in that neighbourhood, instructed to be on the lookout for anything in the wasp line, reported, in June, 1865, a nest of wasps of a kind quite new to him, and before many hours had elapsed the nest, swarm and all, was safe on my study table. This too, was the work of V. britannica, about three inches in diameter, well proportioned, and very neatly made; but it contained only drone brood in the cells, and all the swarm were drones also. Apparently the queen had only laid male eggs from the beginning; and, getting no help from her sons, she had deserted them.

There is no more reason to doubt that the worker wasps, in the absence of their queen, lay eggs than that they build nests. Not only in abortive or secondary nests, but in regular nests, which no Naturalist has disturbed, we may find eggs in the ovaries of the common workers. Eggs and ovaries, indeed, are not always to be found. We may examine many specimens without finding any eggs at all, or even without distinctly tracing the minute ovaries. And the size of the insect is no certain indication of their presence; eggs occur in the smaller as well as in the larger workers. But where eggs are they only need some particular stimulus to call them forth.

The physiological difficulty, however, is not here; there is no mystery about the maternity of the eggs; for we constantly find, even in the higher animals, that eggs may be laid without impregnation. This, as is well known, is the rule in fishes and some reptiles. Its occurrence in birds is familiar to poultry-keepers; and a parrot confined for years in a cage occasionally presents her astonished owner with an egg.* The curious thing is that the removal of the queen-mother should at once stimulate the imperfect ovaries of the workers into activity, that eggs laid under such circumstances should hatch at all, and that hatching they should produce drone brood only.

Whenever I have had an opportunity of examining the comb of a secondary nest, built after the removal of the queen, I have invariably found whatever pupæ it might contain to be of the male sex. This fact, inexplicable on other grounds, is at once explained on the principle of Parthenogenesis as laid down by Siebold. And, as far as my own observations go, I have every reason to believe that wasps conform to this law generally in the same way as honey-bees. But this whole matter still needs examination by other observers and by different modes of inquiry; for, apart from the general facts, there are other questions waiting solution. For instance: Is it certain that the workers do not ever lay eggs when the queen is with them? and, in such case, what becomes of these eggs? Again: remembering that the last laid eggs of the solitary bees produce males,† how far is the

* 'Harvey's Works,' translated by Willis, Sydenham Society, p. 186, contain the fullest information on this subject.

+ Wood. Homes without Hands,' p. 179.

principle of the exhaustion, not the voluntary action, of the queen determining the sex of the brood founded in fact?

Such questions might easily be multiplied, not only as relates to the subject immediately under consideration, but on many other points of the Natural History of Wasps. And if I leave off now, it is not because I have told all their story, even what my own notebooks tell, much less what other books and further observation could, and I trust will, show. It is because the wise man says, "Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour's house, lest he be weary of thee, and so hate thee."

* Proverbs XXV, 17.