Learning from the wasps

Well, I had to pick a subforum within building, and this seemed the closest, although not an exact match.

I have seen paper wasps and yellowjackets gathering wood pulp to build their "paper" nests (technically, the material is called carton). I don't know what they use to stick it together -- maybe they have sticky saliva? -- but the thought came to me that it would be a versatile building material if we could build with carton; reduce waste cardboard to a pulp slurry, and re-form it into whatever shape structure we need. Of course, there would be a few problems:

1. How to get enough material for the needed thickness? A usable structure obviously needs more substantial walls than a corrugated box, even the kind called a "tri-wall."

2. What about weather, i.e. how to prevent rain and snow from re-dissolving it? Yellowjacket nests are not always sheltered from the weather, yet they somehow last all season. Maybe it's that sticky saliva?

I thought I'd run this half-baked idea past the building forum and see if anyone can help bake it some more.

Jason Hernandez wrote:
2. What about weather, i.e. how to prevent rain and snow from re-dissolving it? Yellowjacket nests are not always sheltered from the weather, yet they somehow last all season. Maybe it's that sticky saliva?

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Hi Jason! Thought you might find this useful:
http://2014.igem.org/Team:StanfordBrownSpelman/Material_Waterproofing

It has been a long time, and I am surely memory is a little fuzzy,  but I think some early Mother Earths had a number of articles on different approaches to building with cardboard ....including breaking down the product. The fact that I haven't seen anything more recently might indicate it didn't work too well.