An Inside View

I took down the wasp nest by the potting shed when it seemed they had vacated the premises.  It really is a stunning bit of engineering.  I cut it open and found the dead Queen.  Perhaps that's why the left.  The thin paper it was constructed of was amazing.  You could see how they gathered the pulp from different kinds of trees.  "Thanks to a nature walk by a French scientist named René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, scientists began to observe that wasps were making their nests out of a paper like substance that was far more durable than anything they had witnessed up to that point. Paper wasps take wood and chew it down until it is a pulp and mix it with their saliva and then make their nests from the pieced together pulp."  It took nearly 150 years for humans to perfect the technique and finally make paper out of pulp.  Maine was a world leader in paper production from 1888 to about 2017.  We do have a lot of trees!