Lifted out of a plastic tub, the wasp factory is spread out, floor by dismantled floor, over the dining room table. The all-pervading smell of damp cardboard has evaporated, replaced by a mustiness, and what look like dried mushrooms sprout from the top of each egg tray layer. I expect all of the wasps to be gone.They are not. About a month ago, I stood on top of a ladder under the eaves in front of our sparrow nest box. A queen wasp had moved in the previous summer after the birds failed, and such was her demand for space that an extension spilled out of the nest hole, the entire face encrusted with papier-mache cells. I brushed them off, lifted the lid, then reached up and clawed out each tier of cells in turn, feeling each one pop free as it broke from its anchoring pedicels, the columns by which each layer hung from the one above. I dropped those honeycomb-like, near-weightless slabs from a great height, and collected them up. How does chew, spit and paste create such precision? The queen must work like a potter, for the tubular walls of her hexagonal cells show alternating shades of light brown, as if she had built them up one coil, one mouthful of rasped fence post, at a time. A potter with an inbuilt ruler, for the difference in diameter between each hexagon on the first tier is never as much as half a millimetre. And counting along and up, I estimate that about 700 workers made it from egg to adult from this one level. Other levels show mixed results. One has dozens of cells containing a tiny bead, each one the head of a larval grub, still attached to a shrivelled blackish body. Most trays have failures of metamorphosis. Some cells are capped with a white mesh, like funnel web spider webbing. Grubs spun these protective covers before pupating, only to be entombed. Strangest of all are a few burst membranes with just a head poking out, antennae poised. The birth of winged adults, readying for the maiden flight that never happened.