Pliny the Elder [1st century CE] (Natural History, Book 11, 23-24): [Book 11, 23] ...wasps and hornets are brought to life from horses' bodies... [Book 11, 23] Wasps make their nests high up, of mud, and in them make cells of wax; hornets make them in caverns or underground; all of these have hexagonal cells, and make their combs of bark, like spiders' webs. The actual offspring are not uniform but vary - one flies out while another is in the pupa and another in the grub; and all of these stages are in the autumn, not the spring. They grow chiefly at full moon. The wasps called ichneumon-flies - they are smaller than the others - kill one kind of spider called phalangium and carry them to their nests and then smear them over, and from these by incubating produce their own species. Moreover they all feed on flesh, contrary to bees which never touch a body. But wasps hunt larger flies and after cutting off their heads carry away the rest of the body. - [Rackham translation]

Thomas of Cantimpré [circa 1200-1272 CE] (Liber de natura rerum, Worms 9.52): [Thomas repeats some of this in his description of the hornet, and uses some the same sources there.] Wasps, as Pliny says, make their nests in high places out of mud. The waxes of wasps are not from the collection of flowers, and therefore they are useless. Their life revolves around dung. They eat meat. They hunt larger flies; after cutting off the head and hiding it, they eat the rest of the body. They are said to grow more at the time of the full moon. Wasps sometimes breed from the flesh of horses, as Pope Clement says. - [Badke translation/paraphrase]