Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MASONS THE mason, or mud-building, wasps occupy themselves as their names imply. They are solitary in their habits, and since they do not dwell together in communities, there are no workers among them, only males and females. The female is unquestionably the head of the family; she does the whole work of nest-building and provisioning, and has everything her own way. The male seldom appears upon the scene; he is necessary, but on the whole superfluous in the hard work of life, and he dies in the fall, leaving his partner in undisputed possession of the hereditary family estates, to locate her house as she pleases, and to furnish it as suits her. The
mud-dauber is the best known of the solitary wasps, as it makes itself at home in our attics and outbuildings, where it constructs the little mud nests so familiar to every one. It belongs to the division of digger wasps, and while in a general way these are constructed like the true wasps, they differ in certain particulars. Unlike Vespa and Polistes, the eyes of the daubers are not cut across by a semi- lunar line, but are large and projecting; and unlike the true wasps in general, the wings of the mud-dauber, as of all the diggers, are not folded fan-like down the middle. There are a number of minor characteristics distinguishing the digger from the true wasps, but the wings are the most readily observed, and are enough for ordinary purposes. The mud-dauber, or Pelopasus, is in appearance an elegant dame. She has a very long and very slender waist, ? a ridiculous waist, that long ago caused Aristophanes to compare fashionable women to wasps, calling them what has been translated as
wasp-waisted wenches. Pelopasus’ legs are long and slender, and ornamented with spines. As if conscious of…