“Feeding them isn’t an easy job, I can tell you, especially when it is added to my other duties, but, after a while, each baby weaves a little silken door over its cell, and goes to sleep. When she wakes she is a wasp, and the first thing she does is to wash her face and polish her antennæ, nor is it long before she gets to work. My first children are always workers, and after a number of them are hatched I can give my whole time to laying eggs.” “But when the nest is once done?” began Ruth, who had forgotten her fear entirely and was now quite close to Madame Vespa. “The nest done?” repeated the fiery lady. “You should know that our nest is never done. New cells must be added, old walls gnawed down, and fresh ones built up to enclose larger combs. Indeed, we are never idle. We ventilate as the bees do, and we have sentinels too. Later in the season I lay eggs that hatch out drones, and last of all, the queen eggs. They are——” “Now you would think,” said a yellow jacket, buzzing up excitedly, “you would really think that Vespa might mention the fact that other wasps exist, but not she. Now I want to tell you, the white-faced hornet _isn’t_ the whole thing. There are yellow jackets too.” “We have eyes,” said Madame Vespa, “but go ahead and talk, and get through, for pity’s sake.” “Yes, I mean to talk, and I shall get through when I please. We always insist that people shall respect our rights, and they generally do or—something happens. Our nests are quite as remarkable as Vespa’s, though we do not hang them from trees, as she is in the habit of doing. Our cousin, Mrs. Polistes, also makes a paper nest, but she builds only a layer of cells, with not a sign of a wall about them. Any one can look right in on her private life.” “I’m quite willing they should,” spoke up Mrs. Polistes, a long, slender brown wasp, with a yellow line around her body. “I could wall up my house if I wished to, but I _don’t_ and I _won’t_; so there.” “They all have awful tempers, haven’t they?” said Ruth to Mrs. Horntail. “Tempers?” repeated that lady. “They are perfect pepper pots, though I must say Mrs. Polistes isn’t usually as bad as the others.” “I am talking,” called the yellow jacket, “and the rest of the audience will please keep still. As I was saying, though I doubt if you all heard it, there are other members of our family who have not been mentioned yet. We have miners, masons, and carpenters just like the bees. Of course they are solitary, and——” “I object!” interrupted Mrs. Muddauber. “I won’t be bunched in with ever so many others. I will speak for myself.” She was quite graceful, with a waist as slender as a thread, but she jerked her wings about in such a nervous and fidgety fashion that Mrs. Horntail declared she must have St. Vitus’s dance.