caterpillar victim, nor was the caterpillar dead, for these wasp
cemeteries are, in truth, living tombs, whose apparently dead inmates
are simply sleeping, narcotized by the venom of the wasp sting, and thus
designed to afford fresh living food for the young wasp grub, into whose
voracious care they are committed.

By inserting my knife-blade deep into the soil in the neighborhood of
this burrow I readily unearthed the buried caterpillar, and disclosed
the ominous egg of the wasp firmly imbedded in its body. The hungry
larva which hatches from this egg soon reaches maturity upon the
all-sufficient food thus stored, and before many weeks is transformed to
the full-fledged, long-waisted wasp like its parent.

The disproportion in the sizes of the predatory wasps and their insect
prey is indeed astonishing. The great sand-hornet selects for its most
frequent victim the buzzing cicada, or harvest-fly, an insect much
larger than itself, and which it carries off to its long sand tunnels
by short flights from successive elevated points, such as the limbs of
trees and summits of rocks, to which it repeatedly lugs its clumsy prey.
In the present instance the contrast between the slight body of the wasp
and the plump dimensions of the caterpillar was even more marked, and I
determined to ascertain the proportionate weight of victor and victim.
Constructing a tiny pair of balances with a dead grass stalk, thread,
and two disks of paper, I weighed the wasp, using small square pieces of
paper of equal size as my weights. I found that the wasp exactly
balanced four of the pieces. Removing the wasp and substituting the
caterpillar, I proceeded to add piece after piece of the paper squares
until I had reached a total of twenty-eight, or seven times the number
required by the wasp, before the scales balanced. Similar experiments
with the tiny black wasp and its spider victim showed precisely the same
proportion, and the ratio was once increased eight to one in the
instance of another species of slender orange-and-black-bodied digger
which I subsequently found tugging its caterpillar prey upon my
door-step patch.

[Illustration]

The peculiar feature of the piling of stones above the completed burrow
was not a mere individual accomplishment of my wire-waisted wasp. On
several occasions since I have observed the same manoeuvre, which is
doubtless the regular procedure with this and other species. The smaller
orange-spotted wasp just