akes a roof of
interwoven moss, from which it takes its name. I once gathered the moss
from such a nest by chance and saw the little mass of cells with honey
in them. I went away, meaning to examine it more closely on my return,
but a crow in the apple-tree overhead chanced to spy the nest and made
off with it in his beak before I could rescue the honey store of the
poor little bees I had so unwittingly injured.

That old tree-stump is being gradually carried away by wasps. The wood
is just sufficiently decayed to afford the material of which they make
their nests. You see there are several wasps busily rasping pieces of
the rotten wood into convenient-sized morsels, which they can carry to
the nest, there to be masticated into the papery layers of which the
outer walls of the nest are formed. This walk used to have a row of
grand old silver firs of great height, but each winter some of them have
been blown down till only a few are left.

Some years since I noticed at the root of one of them a pile of fine
sawdust more than a foot high, and found that some wood wasps were
busily engaged in excavating the interior of the tree and forming
tunnels in which to lay their eggs. I watched them for half an hour and
found that every half-minute a wasp went in at the aperture carrying a
blue-bottle or some kind of fly in its mandibles. Next day I took a
friend to see the wasps, and while watching them the wind caused the
immense tree-stem to sway to and fro from its base as if in the act of
falling, and on examination we found it was only held in its place by a
small portion of root, and though the branches were green, it must have
been hollow and dead inside, which appears to be the way in which silver
firs decay, and the wasps had found it out and made a delightful home in
the rotten wood. With some difficulty the great tree was safely taken
down, and then it was a most curious sight to see the endless chambers
and galleries made in the stem, all tenanted by young wasp-grubs and
half-dead flies; and all the summer they were being hatched in countless
numbers. The view over our common is lovely from this point; it is
golden with rich yellow gorse, giving cover to innumerable rabbits,
which find their way into our garden in spite of wire fences and all
that the gardener can do to keep them out. One clever little mother
rabbit made her burrow deep down in a heap of sawdust close to the
stable. My coachman put his arm down to the