picions. At one time I had my doubts about Panzer's Tachytes, whom
I grudged a prey to which the White-banded Sphex might have laid claim.
To-day I have no such doubts: she is an honest worker and her game is
really the result of her hunting. While waiting for the truth to be
revealed and my suspicions set aside, I will complete the little that I
know of her by noting that the Black Tachytes passes the winter in
the adult form and away from her cell. She hibernates, like the Hairy
Ammophila. In warm, sheltered places, with low, perpendicular, bare
banks, dear to the Wasps, I am certain of finding her at any time during
the winter, however briefly I investigate the earthen surface, riddled
with galleries. I find the Tachytes cowering singly in the hot oven
formed by the end of a tunnel. If the temperature be mild and the sky
clear, she emerges from her retreat in January and February and comes to
the surface of the bank to see whether spring is making progress.
When the shadows fall and the heat decreases, she reenters her
winter-quarters.

The Anathema Tachytes (T. anathema, VAN DER LIND), the giant of her
race, almost as large as the Languedocian Sphex and, like her, decorated
with a red scarf round the base of the abdomen, is rarer than any of
her congeners. I have come upon her only some four or five times, as an
isolated individual and always in circumstances which will tell us
of the nature of her game with a probability that comes very near to
certainty. She hunts underground, like the Scoliae. In September I see
her go down into the soil, which has been loosened by a recent light
shower; the movement of the earth turned over keeps me informed of her
subterranean progress. She is like the Mole, ploughing through a meadow
in pursuit of his White Worm. She comes out farther on, nearly a yard
from the spot at which she went in. This long journey underground has
taken her only a few minutes.

Is this due to extraordinary powers of excavation on her part? By no
means: the Anathema Tachytes is an energetic tunneller, no doubt, but,
after all, is incapable of performing so great a labour in so short
a time. If the underground worker is so swift in her progress, it is
because the track followed has already been covered by another. The
trail is ready prepared. We will describe it, for it is clearly defined
before the intervention of the Wasp.

On the surface of the ground, for a length of two paces at most, runs
a sinuo