Field Note No. 18
Date: 23 September 2026
Status: Empty, but still in place
Through the hatch, pressed between the chimney breast and the rafters: a wasps' nest.
It is made entirely of paper. Worker wasps scrape fibres from weathered wood, such as fence posts, sheds and old timber, and chew them into pulp. They carry it back one mouthful at a time and spread it in thin, curved ribbons.
Each ribbon is a single trip. The colour changes with the wood they found, so a fragment of the shell ends up looking like tree rings.
It begins in spring with one queen and a nest the size of a golf ball. By late summer, thousands of workers. By winter, empty. Wasps never return to an old nest.
We pulled a piece away. It weighs almost nothing.
The wasps have gone. The nest is still up there, for now.
