A colony of paper wasps grown cell by cell. The market lands in the meadow; the wasps carry it home and turn it into the next generation.
“The wasp was making paper long before we were.”— A FIELD NOTE, VS-01
The nest is a single open comb of paper cells hanging from a branch by one thin stalk. The queen walks it and lays one egg in every empty cell. Below lies the meadow. Every buy is prey landing in the grass, and the bigger the buy, the bigger the prey: an aphid, a fly, a caterpillar, a cricket, a grasshopper. At 10 SOL and above, a golden hornworm.
The queen sends as many foragers as the prey demands. They fly down, chew it into balls of meat and fly them home to the hungry larvae. A larva fed twice seals itself in, and a few seconds later a new worker chews her way out. When the colony runs out of empty cells, builders fly to the branch, chew wood into pulp and add new paper cells at the edge of the comb. The market literally builds the nest.
A buyback is a ripe fruit falling into the grass: foragers drink from it and bring the sugar home. A burn is old paper torn from the comb and dropped. When the colony gets big, new queens fly off to found nests of their own.
This colony lives in your browser. The console feeds your copy of the nest only; the market feeds everyone's.
Everyone knows the nest. Few people have watched one work. Nobody in it has a plan, yet together they hunt, build, nurse and defend, and the comb grows a cell at a time.
Paper wasps scrape fibre from dead wood, chew it with saliva and spread it into thin sheets. Their nests are paper in the plainest sense.
Adult wasps live mostly on sugar. The protein goes to the larvae: workers hunt insects, chew them into a paste and feed it to the brood.
Northern paper wasps can recognise one another by the markings on their faces, a skill once thought to need a much bigger brain.
A nest is usually started in spring by one queen working alone. Her first daughters become workers. New queens and males appear at the end of summer.
Six-sided cells tile a surface with the least wall for the space they hold. Mathematicians proved it for flat cells in 1999.
Paper wasps eat huge numbers of caterpillars every summer, which makes them welcome in many gardens.
Wasps, like bees, see ultraviolet light. Flowers that look plain to us carry bright targets in ultraviolet. Press V to see the meadow the way the colony does.
| One open comb of paper cells on a single stalk | REAL |
| The queen lays the eggs, one per cell | REAL |
| Larvae are fed chewed insects | REAL |
| Paper chewed from wood fibre | REAL |
| New queens leave to found their own nests | REAL |
| Prey size set by the size of the buy | METAPHOR |
| The queen drawn twenty times life size | METAPHOR |
| The queen gives the orders | FICTION · HERE SHE DOES |
| Burned tokens shed as old paper | FICTION |