Wasps, Bell Cedar

I'd forgotten that Paper Wasps, one of the master builders of the natural world, actually do craft nests in the wild, rather than just in inconvenient places on the eaves of my house. These hard-working members of the Polistes construction crew were busy with some sort of construction project about five feet off the ground in a small shrub, probably one of the invasive olives that are all too abundant in the meadow I was hiking through. I'm guessing the ladies—until reproduction time in late summer, all of the colony members are female—are proceeding with child-rearing or making more paper cells in their abode, but I didn't want get too close to the group to investigate. Polistes wasps are usually not particularly aggressive, but there was no good reason to tempt fate—well, one... I'm not adept at wasp identification, and since I had such apparently cooperative models, perhaps I could have risked getting a close-up. Well, maybe when the weather was cooler and the wasps more likely to suffer my trespasses.