This was to be expected. The number of females who are daughters of the same nest is unknown to me. However, the profusion of their dead bodies in the charnel-pit of the colony tells me that they must be counted by the hundred, perhaps by the thousand. One female is enough to found a city of thirty thousand inhabitants. If all were to prosper, what a scourge! The Wasps would tyrannize over the country-side. The order of things demands that the vast majority shall die, killed not by an accidental epidemic and the inclemency of the season, but by an inevitable destiny, which performs its work of destruction with the same energy as that which it displays in the task of procreation. One question thereupon arises: since a single female, preserved in one way or another, is enough to maintain the species, why does a Wasps’-nest contain so many aspirant mothers? Why a multitude in place of one? Why so many victims? A perturbing problem, in which our intelligence fails to see its way. CHAPTER XI THE COMMON WASP (continued) Of the calamities that befall the Wasp when winter arrives, the worst remains to be told. Foreseeing the approach of failing power, the neuters, hitherto the tenderest of nurses, become savage exterminators: “Let us leave no orphans,” they say to themselves; “no one would tend them after we are gone. Let us kill everything, belated eggs and larvæ alike. A violent end is preferable to slow death by starvation.” A massacre of the innocents ensues. Seized by the scruff of the neck and brutally extirpated from their cells, the larvæ are dragged out of the nest and thrown into the vat at the bottom of the crypt; the eggs, those delicate morsels, are ripped open and devoured. Will it be possible for me to witness this tragic end of the city, not in the fulness of its horror—that ambition is too far beyond my resources—but at least in some of its scenes? Let us try. In October, I place under cover a few fragments of a nest which have been saved from asphyxiation. By moderating the dose of petrol I can easily obtain a number of Wasps afflicted merely with a passing torpor, which enables me to collect them without being stung and which disappears as the sufferers are exposed to the air. Note also that, even with a fairly strong dose of petrol, capable of killing all the adults, the larvæ do not succumb. Mere digesting bellies, they hold out when the more delicately-organized adults perish. Safe from misadventure, I have been able in this way to establish in a cage a portion of a nest rich in eggs and larvæ, with some hundred neuters as attendants.