Three yellow wasps' nests: Mrs. Brown, Mr. Smith and HDT

June 28. 

Geum Virginianum [cream-colored avens]some time, apparently, past its prime by red cohosh. It was not nearly out June 7th; say, then, the 18th. 

I hear on all hands these days, from the elms and other trees, the twittering peep of young gold robins, which have recently left their nests, and apparently indicate their locality to their parents by thus incessantly peeping all day long. 

Observe to-night a yellow wasps' (?) nest, made of the same kind of paper with the hornets', in horizontal strips, some brownish, some white. It is broad cone-shape, some two inches in its smallest diameter, with a hole at the apex beneath about one half inch diameter, and is suspended to the sheathing overhead within the recess at Mrs. Brown's front door. She is afraid of the wasps, and so I brush it off for her. 

It contains only one comb about one and one eighth inches in diameter suspended from above, and this is surrounded by about two thin coverings of paper an eighth of an inch or more apart. The wasps looked at first like bees, with yellow rings on the abdomen. The cells contain what look and move like white grubs. 

It is apparently the same kind of nest that I observed first a few days since, of the same size, under the peak of our roof, just over my chamber windows. 


(July 7th, The last is now five inches in diameter. Watching the nest over my window, I see that the wasps are longer than honey-bees and have a white place between the abdomen and breast. There are commonly three or four visible at once about the nest, and they are continually bringing down new layers of paper from the top about a sixth of an inch distant from the last, building downward on all sides at once evenly and beginning, or starting, a new one before they have finished the first.* 

They have turned the entrance a little outward; i.e., have built the successive layers a little over its inner side, i. e. that to ward the house, so that it partly faces outward. They are continually arriving and departing, and one or two commonly are at work at once on the edge of the new curtain or layer. 

What becomes of the first layers surrounding the comb within? Do they steadily cut them away and use them on the outside, and build new and larger combs beneath ? Some that come forth appear to have something white like the paper in their mouths, at any rate.) 

There is one in Mr. Smith's bank, one side open and flat against the ground. One of his men thinks they will not sting him if he holds his breath.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 28, 1857

*July 14, these new layers are coming down like new leaves, investing it.

I hear on all hands these days, from the elms and other trees, the twittering peep of young gold robins. See June 28, 1855 ("Hear and see young golden robins which have left the nest, now peeping with a peculiar tone."); July 1, 1859 ("The peculiar peep of young tailless golden robins for a day or more"); July 2, 1860 ("Nowadays hear from my window the constant tittering of young golden robins, ")