We were walking through the woods one hot day in the middle of August when our attention was attracted by a stream of yellow–jackets issuing from the ground. They came in such surprising numbers and looked so full of energy that we stopped to watch them, and this was our introduction to the study of these “bold sons of air and heat,” although a perusal of Fabre’s fascinating “Souvenirs Entomologiques” had prepared us to feel a lively interest in them. We were at our summer home near Milwaukee, where meadow and garden, with the wooded island in the lake close by, offered themselves as hunting grounds, while wasps of every kind, the socialistic tribes as well as the extreme individualists of the solitary species, were waiting to be studied. The Vespas that had aroused our interest received our first attention, and a nest in the ground proved to be a most convenient arrangement. Experiments that would have been dangerous to life and limb had we tried them with a paper nest hanging in the open, were easy here so long as we kept calm and unflurried. Intent upon their own affairs, and unsuspicious of evil, perhaps because they knew themselves to be armed against aggression, they accepted our presence, at first with indifference; but as we sat there day after day we must have become landmarks to them, and perhaps before the summer was over they considered us really a part of home. [Illustration: WASP EATING] While poor humanity takes comfort in a mid–day siesta, wasps love the heat of noontide, and with every rise in temperature they fly faster, hum louder, and rejoice more and more in the fullness of life. The entrance to the Vespa nest was but an inch across; and once when they were going in and out in a hurrying throng, jostling each other in their eagerness, we counted the number that passed, one taking the entrances and one the exits. In ten minutes five hundred and ninety–two left the nest and two hundred and forty–seven went in, so that we saw eight hundred and thirty–nine or about eighty to the minute. This must be a strong swarm, wonderful indeed when we thought that it had all come from a single queen mother. We imagined how she had made an early start, digging a hole in the ground, building within it a paper comb with five or six cells around a central column, and laying therein some neuter eggs; how she had then spent a month in attending carefully to the beginnings of things, feeding the young larvæ as they hatched, and watching over them through their childhood and youth; and then how her solicitude was rewarded by the filial devotion with which this first set of workers took upon themselves the labor of excavating, building, and feeding the young, everything indeed except the egg–laying. These queens, surrounded though they are by respectful and attentive subjects, have much the worst of it in our estimation, never going out, and passing their lives in a dull routine. Through the early