I was pondering what to post for this week’s world wildlife Wednesday when a friend who keeps bees posted some wonderful close-up photos on Facebook of the cells her bees had built and that reminded me of these photos I took in Morocco in 2014. These are not bees, of course, these are paper wasps, though I don’t know the exact species.

We were wandering around the magnificent Roman ruins at Volubilis, admiring the incredible architecture and design skills of the Romans, when I spotted this equally amazing construction. As their name implies, these wasps use a papery material to construct their nests. In this case they probably gathered fibrous material from the stems of plants and perhaps from dead wood, which they then chewed up and mixed with saliva to cement the cells of the nest together.

These wasps may look small but their stings can be vicious so, although it looks like I got quite close, these photographs were actually taken with my long lens.