Inez pool, age 11, of Valley Station, Ky. , and to Linda Browne, age 10, of Offton, Mo. for their question:
What do wasps use to build their nests?
Some wasps model their nests of mud and others lay their eggs in a hollow, perhaps in a vacant mouse burrow. But the most interesting wasp builders make their nests of paper. There are, of course, many different wasps and each species builds its own type of nest, just as its ancestors did. A certain bad temperd Bred hornet builds a paper nest that looks somewhat like a football, ,just as its ancestors did for countless generations.
Solitary wasps live in lonely solitude and some of them build an elaborate nest to hold a single egg. One such wasp builds a nest of clay. She chooses a sturdy leaf and carries gobs of mud in her mouth: Bit by bit she models a half inch pitcher with a round middle and a narrow neck. Inside she puts an egg with a supply of food and then she models a neat clay lid to protect the precious contents of the little pitcher.
Other solitary wasps build nests in the ground. Some build a few cells of mud or paper and almost all of them add a supply of food for the little grubs when they hatch from their eggs.
The social wasps live together in sizeable colonies. They build nests with cells and combs shaped like those of the honeybee. Some of them use paper as a building material, real paper made from cellulose and plant fibers. These busy insects gather their building material from old fence posts, from fallen trees and rotting logs.
They chew up the woody fiber and mix each mouthful with saliva, which is spit. Many wasps work together to build the nest, each adding a tiny spit ball. Bit by bit, the cells are built into combs and layers of combs.
When the paper nest dries, it is sturdy enough to shed the rain. The polistes wasp builds a paper nest which looks like a bulky upside down umbrella, It hangs by a short stalk from a low branch and the papery cells have no outside wall to cover them: The bad tempered yellow jacket builds a paper nest that looks like a football perched among the twigs of a lilac bush or a fruit tree. The stacks of papery combs are neatly encased in a papery shell.
A wasp nest is built to last for only one season. When winter comes, the wasps desert the nest and most of them soon perish in the cold weather a few of the young queens survive by hibernating, perhaps in a hollow tree. Come spring, each young queen starts a new nest with a few cells and a few eggs. She will use the same building material and the same design that her ancestors have used for countless waspy generations.