In my note of August 12 I said that I had discovered where certain social wasps of the genus Polistes go in the winter time. It happened in this way. It will be remembered that I described the building of a nest of this species on the rambler rose that grows, over my porch, which was knocked down in a typhoon and subsequently was wired back in position by the gardener. Some of the wasps still clung to the nest, adding further cells and looking after the developing larvae, so that by the end of summer there was quite a flourishing colony. Towards the end of autumn the wasps all disappeared. Later I had occasion to repair the split bamboo revetment of my goldfish pond. It so happened that one of the bamboo poles supporting the rambler roses growing over the porch was considerably longer than necessary, so I had the gardener saw off a piece and told him to split it into strips for the repair work on the pond revetment. Standing the section of bamboo on end, he cleft it with the Chinese equivalent of a billhook, whereupon out came a swarm of yellow wasps, exactly the kind that had built their nest on my porch within a few feet of the section of bamboo framework the gardener had sawed off. They were evidently very annoyed at being thus rudely awakened froth their winter's sleep, and buzzed angrily about the disturber of their peace. The gardener, dropping billhook and bamboo, began frantically beating off the wasps. This seemed only to make them the more angry, as they set about him in real earnest, stinging him on head, face and hands. One or two came over to where I was standing and served me the same way, but, though their stings were painful enough, I was too entertained by the antics of the gardener, as he performed a fantastic dance upon the lawn in his efforts to escape the horde of insects swarming about him, to worry about those that were attacking me. In the end, however, we both had to beat a hasty and undignified retreat, leaving the wasps ili possession of the garden. Later, when we returned, we found that they had decamped, and I was able to examine the bamboo section from which they had emerged. There was a neat round hole in one of the chambers of the hollow bamboo, and I have no doubt that it was through this that the insects gained entrance to what they must have considered eminently desirable winter quarters. I would like here to add a further brief note on this species of wasp. summer a colony built a very fine nest in $ clump of bamboos in my garden, but, during the typhoon that struck Shanghai on August 16, the branch to which it was attached was snapped off. The nest fell down but was caught in a fork a few inches above ground. When I discovered this catastrophe to the colony after the typhoon had passed, it was to find half the wasps still clinging to the Best and the fest swarming on the bamboo stalk upon which it had originally hung. By degrees all the wasps left the old nest and joined those on the stalk, where they set about building a new nest. I picked up the old nest and brought it into the house for detailed examination, noting that many of the cells it contained were still, sealed up, with nymphs inside. A few bouts later, much to my interest, but fbe horror of my wife, who still does not like these insects, there emerged from these cells a number of wasps, which crawling about the nest and buzzed ties, and produce a state of scientific stagnamight prove a great damper on their beet eu whenever I touched it. Regardless of interests of scientific research, they had to tion. Tt is true that that might be the lesser evil, but progress has always to continue. Attempts to place checks upon it.might lead to just the same destruction as that which is threatened by modern rapidity in discovery. And so the vicious circle is closed and the argument comes back to where it started. Man is merely the victim of his own clever-be disposed of; but at least I am able to tell my readers one of the places where wasps go in the winter time—the hollow chambers of bamboo poles. Confirmation of this is supplied in the from of a beautifully worked piece óf ivory in my art collection, representing a split section of bamboo with the tifélike carving of one of these seme wasps testing in one of the chambers—A, DE C. S. 3
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.