244 KANSAS UNIVERSITY SCIENCE BULLETIN. 



from the ceiling of the little room. After breaking the suspensory 

 thread with a knife and brushing the egg out, I placed it among the 

 caterpillars in the bottom of the vial. Very few wasp's eggs could 

 stand the rough handling which this egg received. The explanation of 

 its endurance lies in the toughness of its shell. The larva hatched in two 

 and one-half days, having shed a tough translucent shell which could 

 safely be handled with a forceps. After fifteen hours the larva 

 had attached itself to a writhing caterpillar and had grown percep- 

 tibly. . . . 



The length of the egg stage of O. arvensis is about two and a half 

 days; of the larval stage, four and a half days; of the pupal stage, 

 eighteen days. 



Another nest which I observed an arvensis store and close on August 

 14 I opened nearly a month later (September 9). I was expecting to see 

 a wasp emerge by this time, and had placed a bottle over the entrance 

 to receive it. I found in the nest no offspring of the wasp, but a red 

 pupa of a fly and fourteen caterpillars, of which four had dried up, throe 

 were dead though in good condition, and seven were actually alive. 



Three caterpillars lived forty-three days, one forty-six days, and one 

 remained for fifty-eight days in a condition good enough to be added to 

 any waspling's bill of fare. 



A survey of these few facts would seem to indicate that while the 

 suspension of the egg and the young larvje is a desirable condition and 

 increases their chances of successful development, yet it is not an essen- 

 tial condition, as Fabre contended. Nor is it essential, in consideration of 

 the longevity of the paralyzed prey, that the caterpillars be devoured in 

 the order in which they were stored. 



Three Kansas Eumenidse — 0. annulatus, O. geminns, and 0. 

 foraminatufs — were observed by Messrs. Hungerford and F. X. 

 Williams'' in northwestern Kansas, while on the Kansas Uni- 

 versity Biological Survey during the summer of 1910. 0. an- 

 nulatus is one of the species whose nesting habits I observed. I 

 collected a number of specimens of 0. geminus, but did not ob- 

 serve any of its nesting activities. 



The excavation of two nests of 0. annulatus was observed 

 by the authors. These nests were burrows dug in open spaces 

 in the prairie ; over the burrow was constructed a short, al- 

 most vertical tube. The wasp moistened the earth, before 

 digging, with water from a lagoon; in digging .she employed 

 her mouth parts and fore legs. Excavated earth was used in 

 tube construction, and the rest carried off and dropped several 

 feet away. "It is noteworthy," they write, "that Odijnerus in 

 disposing of the pellets of earth (which she does on the wing) 

 does not cast them about indiscriminately, for it was observed 

 that one wasp dropped them at a distance of from four to six 



9. Ent. News, vol. 33, pp. 250-255. 



