[xoxoxoBruce]

When wasp is art The construction of structures in nature is very widespread and very few ones who stop to think about how to make an animal to build such structures. Just to quote Richard Dawkins: Just imagine the newspapers if a marine biologist discovered a species of dolphins weaving fishing nets large, complex securities with a diameter of twenty dolphins! And yet we take for granted the cobwebs, considering them as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world. from The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins As the cobwebs even the wasp nests represent a nuisance that happens every year in spring. Before you drive them away, stop watching the perfect geometry of the nest. The building material varies greatly in different species, not just wasps but also in bees. The masons of wasps Sceliphron kind are actually bees (in fact belong to the superfamily Apoidea and not vespoidea) and build nests using mud, inside which the larvae grow by eating paralyzed spiders.

Let's focus on cellulose nests, built in Italy by various species of Vespids belonging to the genera Vespa, Vespula, Dolichovespula and Polistes.
The other genera distributed a little 'everywhere in the world leave no brake to the imagination, first of all Stenogastrinae, a subfamily of wasps of Southeast Asia that build nests rather bizarre.

Returning to native species, we come to the real purpose of this article: to show how, with a little 'color and imagination, these buildings can appear even the least artistic insect lovers.
Below you can see a small colony in the founding of Polistes dominula. The species has an interesting behavioral repertoire, very well designed, and is used as a model species for studies on dell'eusocialità.
This nest was found with two founding in mid-April, then unfortunately one of them died.

To individuals placed in captivity has been provided food and paper for nest building, at first only yellow, then colored.

A worker recently sfarfallata remains holed up in the cell.

In the lower left you see two wasps while doing trophallaxis.

Right some larvae are exposed on the outside of the cells.

You're welcome.