Woe to the sick among these rude professors of hygiene! Any and every cripple is expelled and thrown to the maggot waiting to eat him in the catacombs below. Should the experimenter intervene, matters take an even more atrocious turn. I remove from their cells a few larvæ and nymphs in excellent health and place them on the surface of the combs. Once outside the cells, where the nymphs were maturing under a silken cupola, while the larvæ were being spoon-fed with the utmost tenderness, the delicate creatures are mere hateful obstacles and useless encumbrances. Ferociously the workers tug at them, disembowel them and even eat a little of them. After this cannibal repast, the victims are carted outside the nest. Incapable of reentering their cradles, even with assistance, larvæ and nymphs, stripped bare, perish, slain by their nurses. In the cage, however, the grubs generally display a well-fed, glossy skin, a certificate of good health. But see what happens on the advent of the first cold nights of November. The building proceeds with diminished enthusiasm; the visits to the pool of honey are less assiduous. Household duties are relaxed. Grubs gaping with hunger receive tardy relief, or are even neglected. Profound uneasiness seizes upon the nurses. Their former devotion is succeeded by indifference, which soon turns to aversion. What is the use of continuing attentions which presently will become impossible? In view of the imminent famine, our beloved nurselings must die a tragic death. The neuters, in fact, grab the late-born larvæ, these to-day, those to-morrow, sooner or later the rest, and root them out of their cells with the same violence which they would employ against a stranger or a lifeless body; they tug at them, savagely rend them; and all this poor flesh is sent down to the pit. Before much longer, the neuters themselves, the executioners, are languidly dragging what remains of their lives. At length they also succumb, killed by the weather. November is not yet past; and nothing is left alive in my cage. The final massacre of the tardy larvæ must take place underground in more or less the same manner, but on a larger scale. Day after day the catacombs of the Wasps’-nest receive the dead and dying hurled down from above, sickly larvæ and such Wasps as have been injured by accident. Rare in the prosperous season, these falls into the charnel-heap become increasingly frequent as winter approaches. When the late-born grubs are being exterminated and above all at the moment of the final catastrophe, when the adults, males, females and neuters, are dying in their thousands, the manna descends in a copious downfall daily.