The cells of the lower combs are larger than those of the upper; they are set aside for the rearing of the females and the males, while those in the stories up above serve for the neuters, who are a little smaller. At first the community requires, before all else, an abundance of workers, of celibates exclusively addicted to work, who enlarge the dwelling and prepare it to become a flourishing city. Preoccupations for the future belong to a later stage. More capacious cells are constructed, some intended for the males, others for the females. According to figures which I will give later, the sexed population represents about one-third of the whole. Let us also observe that, in a Wasps’-nest which has reached an advanced age, the cells in the upper stories have their walls gnawed right down to the base. They are ruins of which naught remains but the foundations. Useless from the moment when the community, now rich in workers, has only to be completed by the appearance of the two sexes, the tiny chambers have been pulled down; and their paper, once more reduced to pulp, has been used for the construction of the large cells, which form the cradles of the sexed grubs. With the additional material brought from without, the demolished cells have served for building new and bigger cells; they have also perhaps provided the wherewithal for a few more scales to the outer wrapper. Sparing of her time, the Wasp does not trouble to exploit distant sources when she has available materials in the house. She knows as well as we do how to make old things into new. In a complete nest the total number of cells amounts to thousands. Here, for example, are the statistics of one of my specimens. The combs are numbered in the order of seniority: the oldest and therefore the topmost in the stack is no. 1; the most recent and therefore the undermost is no. 10. Combs, in their Diameter, Number order from top in inches of cells to bottom 1 3.94 300 2 6.28 600 3 7.87 2,000 4 9.45 2,200 5 9.84 2,300 6 10.23 1,300 7 9.45 1,200 8 9.06 1,000 9 7.87 700 10 5.12 300 ------ Total ... 11,900 cells.