The Dollhouse Nest

What it looks like, and what it does

A grey paper nest the size of a cabbage under the eaves, built in layered cells which, in section, reveal tiny rooms: a stair, a table with six minute chairs, a window with a curtain. Wasps drifting in and out of the miniature doors.

Builds from May to September. Works in the evening. Is not aggressive to the household.

What is known

The nest at 8 Orchard Close is a paper model of the house at a scale of 1:30. A section cut in 2003 revealed rooms in detail, down to the supper laid on the table.

It is rebuilt every summer. The model shows the house as it was the year the youngest left. The family cannot decide whether to be touched.

What it can do

• Builds a paper model of the house it inhabits
• Reproduces details no wasp could have seen

Where it stops

• Abandons the nest after one season
• Cannot reproduce a room that nobody has entered

An encounter

Radwell sectioned the nest on request and photographed the stairs, the table and the dresser. In the garden of the model stood a tiny figure looking up at the house. It was made of the same paper as the walls. Nobody in the family recalls anyone standing there. He declined to remove the nest and did not charge.

Colin Radwell, pest controller, 8 Orchard Close, under the eaves, August

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Four sectioned nests over twenty years match the house as photographed in 1998.
• incomplete: Nobody has identified the figure. It is too small to show a face.
• rumor: That the family no longer discuss the garden.

Still unresolved

The figure in the model garden has appeared in every nest since 2003. It is a little closer to the house each year.

Where it has been recorded

• Orchard Close (confirmed) — Recorded by Colin Radwell, pest controller.

Stories about it

• The Dollhouse Nest at Thornhill (Entity story, 3 min) — A family in an old terrace finds a wasp nest hanging in their attic that is built as an exact model of their house as it stood in the year they were most together, down to the furniture and the faded wallpaper, and the wasps have begun to rearrange the rooms.

Connected entities

• The Bread Mother — Both keep the family at its most gathered, and both have been found to be keeping one person more than the household knows.