Queen Factories Discoverers of wasps' nests very late in the
year are wont. to think it hardly worth while to destroy the brood ; but now is the time when the work is most effective. Just before the end the wasps—and they are peculiar in this—concentrate on the production of queens, which go forth into hibernation almost at once. A good five hundred queens—as several researches have proved—may come out of one nest. Hence the true explanation of a common fact which often astonishes observers, that a year almost free from wasps (such as this blessed summer) may be followed by a year of plague. Nature's devices for ensuring the continuance of a race are many and surprising. I have reed in many places, including a leading article in The Times, about the number of certain butterflies, especially "Clouded Yellows " ; but in none of these passages have I seen any reference to the largest of all our butterflies, the Swallow-tails. There seems to be a general belief that they are confined to one little district in the Cambridgeshire Fens, but they abounded—they were, as it seemed to me, the commonest of the butterflies—beside some of the Norfolk Broads, where they chiefly frequented the flowers of the Ragged Robin which grows in quantity along the dykes.
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