50 THE SOLITARY WASPS. 



may be said to share our cottage, so thickly does she liang lier 

 combs under the shelter of our porches, and from observations 

 taken at all hours we know that she is quiet through the night. 

 Sir John Lubbock in "Ants, Bees, and Wasps," speaks of the 

 great industiy of wasps. He has known them to work from 

 early morning until dusk without any interval for rest or re- 

 freshment; but here was our little Crabro toiling from three in 

 the afternoon of July twenty-seventh, through that night and 

 the day and night following until nine o'clock on the morning 

 of the tA\enty-ninth, — a period of forty-two consecutive hours 

 with one intermission of ten minutes on the morning of the 

 twenty-eighth. Surely she takes the palm for industry, not only 

 from other wasps but from the ant andj the bee as well. 



The nest was completed but the work of storing it remained 

 to be done. The wasp flew away at nine o'clock, and ten min- 

 utes later came back with something, we knew not what, for she 

 dropped into her hole so quickly that she was out of sight almost 

 before we knew she was there. Two minutes latei' she came up 

 and was off again. This time she was gone twelve minutes and 

 when she came back we were again baffled in our effort to see 

 what she was carrying. When she came out she alighted upon 

 a leaf and attended to her toilet, cleaning both body and wings 

 by rubbing them off with her hind legs, and from this time on 

 she never started on a hunting expedition without paying this 

 attention to her personal appearance. On her third trip she 

 was gone twenty minutes. We tried to delay her entrance, 

 when she returned, in order to see what she was bringing in, but 

 did not succeed. In another twenty minutes she came home 

 again and this time we saw that she was carrying a small fly. 

 Her record for the rest of the morning is as follows: 



Returned. Left. 



10.28 10.30 



10.42 10.44 



11.1 11.3 



11.6 11.7 



11.23 1L26 



11.34 11.35 



